Success Unexpected in Common Hours

Abstract

My early impulse, to be a philosopher in the American tradition working on problems in education, has proven fortuitous. My teachers were well-meaning but not wise in thinking I could not make a meaningful career following the path I set out to follow. Sanity is putting one foot in front of another, not in doing the done thing or making the smooth move. As one of my American heroes, Henry Miller, wrote somewhere, people think they need a lifejacket, but it is the lifejacket that will sink them. As another American hero, Henry David Thoreau, put it in the final chapter of Walden, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” and “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”