Good Night
Current Wx: Temp: 61.16°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 5.91mphWords: 584
Bit of a long day today. Drove out to Minoa, 84 miles from here, and spoke to a couple of prospective plebes. Spoke extemporaneously this time. Not sure I did a great job, but everyone was polite about it.
After I got home, YouTube's algorithm offered this in my feed. Pretty inspiring, and it felt pretty serendipitous after my day trip.
Then Mitzi started watching a three part documentary on U.S. Grant on Netflix. I got sucked into it. I was modestly familiar with much of Grant's story, but the documentary covered a great deal that was new to me. It's a remarkable story about a profoundly great American leader, and if you're a Netflix subscriber, I heartily commend it to your attention.
Finally, scanning my feeds before noticing the sky and taking this photo before bed, I came across this post at The Marginalian.
That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.
And again I felt that sense of serendipity. That I was "in the groove," on the right frequency.
I spoke to the prospective midshipman about the fact that our culture is fixated on achievements and milestones. We work hard and sacrifice to earn them, and we're lauded and celebrated for them.
But we don't talk about something else, which is perhaps more important, and that is the reason why.
Why are we here?
I told them we are here to make meaning. And that one of the best ways to do that is through service to others. I told them that service is action, informed by our values. I tied that in with the Navy's core values, honor, courage and commitment. I told them that honor is a quality of one's character that accrues from keeping faith with our shared values. That honor and meaning aren't the same things, but they are adjacent. That one is earned, while the other is made.
I pointed out that there are so-called leaders all around us who are squandering the opportunity to make meaning in their lives, in service of something other than our shared values. I did not say that there was no honor in that; but I hope the inference was clear.
Perhaps not.
I asked them to be continue to strive for their achievements, to celebrate their milestones; but to be alert to the opportunities to make meaning in their lives, for there will be many. And that fifty years from now, as they look back on their lives, it will be the meaning that they treasure, not so much the achievements.
I got kind of gooey a couple of times, talking about shipmates and classmates lost in violence. Or things I learned while in service. I think I did a better job in this synopsis than I did when I was speaking. On my drive home, I kept kind of replaying it in my mind and wishing maybe I'd simply memorized the same pitch I made last year, and wondering if all that driving, and all that talking mattered at all.
And the universe delivered a few suggestions that it was perhaps all exactly the way it was supposed to be.
So goodnight.
Oh, that's Venus and Jupiter up there, getting closer together each night. This might be the closest, I"m not sure. Pretty captivating when you see them.
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