The Three C’s
To inspire me every day now to continue on this my life’s journey as a caring servant of every child whose company I share, I have placed on my desk a photograph of me at the peak of my career. It shows my very beginning as a person smiling in the spring sunshine of the Bronx. My twin brother, Peter, and I are sitting with our Mom there on a small bench placed before the small hedged garden right in front of our red brick home. Sunshine and shadows dance on our three happy smiling faces.
We were still kids; looks like we were just two going on three years of age. I say it depicts me clearly at the peak of my career for it is obvious that I was not a “me” yet, and a sacred innocence was plainly visible in my face. This old photograph reveals very obviously that my primary sense then was my seeing – my simple yet profound perceiving the sacredness of ordinary life right there in front of me, and you can see there in my face the overwhelming happiness I was feeling for all the wonderful things right there in that now of my life as a little child.
Much later when I had grown up and had become an existentialist philosopher and poet -- a twenty somewhat year old graduate student at Fordham University in the Bronx still -- I was encouraged by a professor to investigate just what the modern artists were striving to reveal to us. I dutifully went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan and began to study the artistic renderings within their second floor galleries dedicated to Modern Art.
I entered one small room in which was hung a single very large painting which was very simply a beautiful blue painted canvas with one diagonal swatch of red paint boldly and dramatically there – I almost heard it as a triumphant shout! I sat on the bench there trying to grasp what this artist wanted to share with me, and suddenly I realized that I too had made just such a painting when I was only a toddler.
I remembered crawling with a red crayon in my hand into our living room and there with great delight reaching out and making this upward very personal mark on the clean white wall next to the couch. I thrilled in the seeing of this singular contrast of my red crayon line and its sensuous waxy presence there on the flat pale wall.
I do not recall if our mother was as pleased as I was, but this memory revealed in a flash just what this modern artist was wanting to convey: There is great meaning in one’s becoming a child again – there is a richness in recapturing the innocent epiphanies of first experiences – so sacred, for you are still at that time not yet a self-conscious “me” but totally open to what you are creating – to what you are communicating – to what you are actually living sharing that moment.
The existentialist philosopher Buber had observed: “What counts is to know and to believe what one experiences and believes so directly that it can be translated into the life one lives.” That is who I was as a child – and that is what I wanted to always be all my life.
I offer a bi-weekly seminar in existential ethics for our middle school students. By round-table discussions evoked from selected case studies of real life situations in which a personal decision must be made of what is the right thing to be done, I foster an awareness in them that they each possess an innate potentiality to become a virtuous person by deciding to act kindly not selfishly, to be wise and not foolish.
Having mastered the “Three Rs” they as they enter young adulthood are now ready to discover that becoming an empowered person requires the “Three Cs,” namely, the uniquely human act of honest communication that enables the creation of the almost mystical communion in which two “me s” wondrously become the kind of a “we” our hearts have always yearned for, and from that fruitful bonding of daily shared kindness is born a community that flourishes with the love and with the caring intelligence and with the creation of new beauty that brings true meaning to our whirling, silent, yet glorious universe.
So I meditate on the little boy that I was then when that snapshot was taken so many years ago, and I can see all these personal potentials that were already being actualized as I drank in life with my innocent seeing – and then as I turn to the children before me in this here and now, I strive all the more to join with our faculty and students in the creation of a true culture of compassion where we each come away from our daily encounters better and happier – which will be so evident by the look of kindness in our faces, by the gleam of joy in our eyes, and by the simple yet profound goodness of our greetings. Worthy of another snapshot!
Peace,
Paul
November 23, 2010
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Paul Czaja
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