Let’s be clear. I have some idiosyncrasies in life and especially when teaching. One is that I want all students to learn, which means that cutting and pasting something from the Internet without citing it and using quotation marks is not okay. Another of my concerns is that some students think that a due date for an assignment means only a suggestion about when they need to turn in the essays.

On the brighter side of my idiosyncrasies, I want my students to become all they can be. I want them to ponder, think, and wonder about their meaning of being.

My first announcement of the semester, which spells out a handful of requirements like not plagiarizing, getting things in on time, etc., ends this closing comment.

I meant what I wrote about this not being a hyperbolic statement. If the students adhere to the course’s game plan, the course will change their lives for the best.

This is a copy of what one of my students just wrote to me as we ended the spring semester.

That note makes up for all the other nonsense I get from a handful of other students. I want them to think about life and their place in the world. What I didn’t want to merely repeat something someone else said. This is especially true since many other writers, philosophers, and theologians wrote a century or millennia ago.

Enter the Cosmic Calendar. This calendar is new to nearly all the students. Talk about eye-opening experiences.

Click on this link for a larger picture of the Cosmic Calendar

Carl Sagan expressed the concept of the Cosmic Calendar in both his book, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence and his television series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Sagan reduced ca. 14-billion years since the Big Bang to the present-day into a calendar of 365 days. The Cosmic Calendar allows us to conceptualize the vastness of time and our place in the universe.

I want my students to ponder their reason for being. They came into this world on the last day of the year, the last hour, the last minute, the last second, and the last 0.23 of a second in the Cosmic Calendar. Their lives will be the same amount of time on the Cosmic Calendar as it takes to blink eyes once.

It seems a gross waste of time to repeat what someone said a millennium or more ago about the meaning of being. I will find out sooner than any of my class about what, if anything, there is beyond death. I have done the dance with death twice and see life differently than I did prior to my dances. I am far more interested in the known present than repeating statements made long ago or what people think about what occurs after death.

Some of the sages of the past have uttered their truism for all the world to hear. For example, the world was created in six days, women are second-class, and other people that are not like them racially.

The ancient Greeks used the word ὕβρις, which we know as hubris. Hubris is the mindset of people that they know everything. They arrogantly diss those that don’t think like them. The purpose of our being wasn’t something that some deity created the universe 14 billion years ago so that Homo sapiens could migrate out of Africa in the last couple of minutes at the end of the Cosmic Calendar year.

I want my students to think outside the box of their world. We can create a reality for all of us in our world by reaching out to others and helping them journey down the yellow brick roads of their lives.

Bobby Kennedy said decades ago. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

...sweeping down walls of oppression and resistance.

Each of us can discover our reason for being.