The stuff of life
Happy Friday, everyone.
Many years ago now, back when I was in law school, I was having a conversation with Ray (then my fiancé) about the ethics and pitfalls of being an attorney. He was asking probing questions, as he tends to do.
Questions like, “What if you realize your client is guilty, but you’ve already committed to defending him—what would you do? What if you kind of suspect your client is guilty, but you aren’t sure? What if your client acts against your advice, and then blames you, and your reputation is on the line but you don’t want to betray your client? What if…?” It was a series of hypotheticals designed to put me, the bright-eyed young future attorney, in as tough an ethical spot as possible, to find out what I would do, what principles and values would sustain me, and how I would respond under such pressure.
Finally, he asked me, “Aren’t you scared that as a lawyer, you’ll find yourself in this type of situation? A situation where you have to make some kind of really hard and complicated moral choice?”
I thought for a moment, and then answered what I suddenly realized was the truth: “The hard choices, the hard situations, the moments when you have to figure out and do the right thing in the face of tremendous pressure—that’s the stuff of life. Yes, it can be scary, but I want a life that includes those moments. They are the points on the journey when you are truly and fully alive.”
It’s a perspective Ray and I have shared ever since, and returned to from time to time. The perspective that life is a grand, exalting adventure. That it’s a story, and that like any good story, characters should face dramatic plot twists, forks in the road, and the uncertainty of having to make hard choices. That nothing worth doing is easy. That if, in those hardest moments that life can throw at you, you draw yourself up, you go back to your core and to the things that you know are important—and you stand by those principles, you pursue them through the fire—then in those moments you will feel truly grand and truly alive. It is by embracing and honoring the responsibility of choice that we earn both the right and the ability to be happy.
I’ve had a few key moments like that in my life so far, some big and some smaller, where I have felt that a choice was incredibly hard, almost too hard for me to face. Moments that it took everything in me to stay clear-eyed about who I was, and where maybe no one but me even understood how much pressure I felt or what was at stake. I made the choice, and in the act of making it I felt elevated. I felt a heightened self-awareness and self-esteem. It has only confirmed for me that this is indeed the “stuff of life”.
One such moment was the moment when Ray, I, and a small group of others decided to start Higher Ground Education. It wasn’t necessarily the ideal moment to take that kind of risk. My middle son, Hugo, had just been born. We didn’t have much savings. And since we would both be starting the company together, neither one of us would have a stable job to fall back on if our project failed. We were quite literally putting everything we had on the line.
But it was what we wanted to do. We had a very specific vision for the kind of education we wanted to bring to the world, and the kind of organization that we thought would be required to do that. We had seen, through hard-won experience, that we would only be able to achieve what we wanted to achieve if we did it ourselves, based on our own judgment of the goals, strategy, and path, and working with co-founders and colleagues who really believed in and shared the vision. And we knew that when we looked back at the end of our lives, we could only be happy with our time on earth if we knew that we had tried.
And so, at the end of the day, it just wasn’t that hard of a choice.
That was an anxious time for me. Most nights I fell asleep with my mind churning and fear in the pit of my stomach. But I’ll tell you something. Ultimately, there are few times in my life that I have felt as good and as alive as the early months of starting Higher Ground Education. I said to myself, “This is right. This is worth doing. I want this, and I’m going to reach for it with both hands. Who cares if I fail? Maybe I’ll fail 12 times before I succeed. Or maybe I’ll never succeed. It won’t matter. Because I’ll be proud of the attempt. I’ll be proud of the choice to reach for an ideal and work to achieve it.”
Since then, I’ve come to recognize that exact same attitude and courage in the people around me here at HGE, at Prepared Montessorian, and across our Guidepost and ATI schools. I’ve seen it in many forms, from big, sweeping life decisions, to tiny daily acts of dedication and rededication. At the root of it all is the belief, in the teeth of obstacles and in the throes of struggle, that life is about making choices, including hard, defining choices, and that in making good choices we earn our happiness and fully experience ourselves.
I think this kind of perspective is something that we can and do give to the children and young adults in our programs. We want them to grow up equipped to sustain themselves through challenges and to make hard decisions with clarity and inner peace. More than that, we want them to feel that the challenges and hard decisions are what life is about! We want them to long for the hero’s quest, and the great moral crises it will bring. We want them to seek out challenges, one after another, with ever-growing confidence that such challenges are there precisely to give us the pleasure of surmounting them.
We had an older elementary child years back who had a pretty rocky home life and not many great role models in his world. His siblings had had problems with drugs, had dropped out of high school, and had not done much with themselves. His parents took little interest in really understanding him, and did not place great emphasis on his personal development. He certainly had his share of challenges while he was with us. But somewhere along the line, he made a choice, and his teachers saw it in him. It was the choice to be different from the role models in his life. The choice to respect himself, to take his life seriously, and to reach for something. We probably can’t know exactly why he made that choice, or whether it was something specific we did that helped to tip the balance. Was it the constant exposure to great literature, and the discussion of heroic characters and the hard choices they made? Was it the modeling he saw from guides he admired? Was it the gentle encouragement to make smaller choices that would add up to good character over time? Did it simply come from some kernel of courage deep in him that had always been there, waiting to flower? Maybe it was a combination of all of those things.
What we can say is that, somehow, he came to embrace just how much power he had over his own future. This is our goal for children: to create an environment where they naturally draw fundamental, metaphysical conclusions that lead them to recognize the world as a place to pursue great adventures and accomplish great things. By giving the right challenge at the right level, at the right moment, with the right inspiration, and by celebrating the struggle and guiltlessly enjoying its fruits, we help children develop a capacity to seek and enjoy hard challenges that will carry through into adulthood.
What I want for each of our children is for them to experience at least one moment in their lifetimes akin to that moment when I and our other founding team members took the leap of faith to start Higher Ground Education. I want them to feel the quiet, self-sufficient pride that comes from looking a difficult choice straight in the eye, and then drawing on your core to make the right decision. These moments of might be as rare as they are difficult, but they make us who we are.
They are indeed the stuff of life.
Rebecca Girn
Chief Programs Officer, Higher Ground Education