Finished, Unfinished and Hopeful

 I finished my course as of this weekend. I have to say that it was a whirlwind, and I did learn a lot in spite of the intensity of the readings and the weekly postings online. Quite often, the tasks of life are full of mixed blessings. On the one hand, there is always possibility of failure and not owning up to the requirements and responsibilities of the course. On the other hand, there is the blessing of knowing that what I am learning can make a contribution to my students' understanding as well as support my own growth.
   Some of this reminds me of what Carl Rogers spoke about many years ago in regards to the fullness of the self. Rogers would have articulated it better, but one of the tenets of the therapy he espouses is that each individual contains a rich and complex combination of different inclinations. To try to reduce one's own personality to one or two isolated traits is to do violence to the soul.. At the same time, I would apply this very same principle to all actions. There really isn't an "all good" or "all bad' undertaking, and it seems that even the most trivial undertakings can have a richness to them which contains a mixture of many elements. Just as Rogers asks his clients to consider their own complexity and to honor it, so also one can consider every action as containing many kinds of elements, and to honor them as parts of a whole. I think that this holistic view can allow me to bear the sometimes rough patches and challenges of doing course work.