I haven’t shared them on the newsletter, but I’ve now recorded a few bonus episodes of what I call Independent Study: bits of writing—often essays—that have inspired me and feel complimentary to the project I’m pursuing with Dialectic conversations.
The first was an new essay from early guest Toby Shorin (ep. 7: The Shapes of Culture): Body Futurism (reading, original). The second was Philosopher Agnes Callard’s essay, Art is for Seeing Evil (reading, original).
Today’s reading was actually originally a speech, given by 20th century public servant, educator, and public reformer John W. Gardner. It was delivered to a group at McKinsie & Co in Phoenix, AZ on November 10, 1990. The transcript of Personal Renewal is available at PBS.
Willem Van Lancker shared this with me in 2024, before I’d started Dialectic and while I was trying to figure out what was next. I’m grateful. I’ve returned to it about a dozen times and shared it with more than as many people. Even during this reading, I felt myself getting goosebumps, and I felt aliveness rising in my soul. I hope you are similarly inspired.
Available here on Substack, Spotify, Apple, and RSS podcast platforms.
Gardner begins with barnacles, and pleas with all of us to not live our lives so stubbornly and stagnantly:
“The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.
Then comes one of the strongest cases for fighting inertia that I’ve ever read. He encourages us to pursue continual renewal, by way of recognition, self-belief, and commitments.
By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills... You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.
“There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.“
You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.
Spotify:
