Michael Hawley

I am always pensive this time of year. It’s beautiful where I live- the trees ablaze with color and the air breezing with the promise of winter. Recently my thoughts have turned to 2003, a year that changed the course of my life. I began a journey of a lifetime.

I was young then, only 21, and ruler of my universe. I was full of dreams and promise, and like every young twenty-something, finding myself. I dreamed of finding Mr. Tall, Dark, Rich and Handsome, of university and my studies, becoming independently wealthy and most of all- travelling the world with a backpack of my only possessions--adventuring my way through life.

I sat at the kitchen table reading my mother’s Discover magazine, lazily flipping the pages, until an interview with a man named Michael Hawley caught my attention. He was at MIT at that time, working on digital media. If anything, my brain soaks up anything relating to the world of innovation. The words that followed changed my life.

In the fall of 1979 I was walking across the Yale campus when I first ran into Bart Giamatti who was president then. He stopped me, and we had a freshman-to-president conversation. He asked me if I had a girlfriend yet. I said, “Yeah.” He said, “That’s pretty good. You’re not spending too much time in classes are you?”

I was expecting him to tell me to write neatly in my blue book and amortize my dad’s investment. Instead, he wanted to know how many friends I had. He said the most valuable thing I could do at Yale was to meet as many people as I could, whether they were classmates or teachers or visitors because behind every one of those faces was a different take on a vast world. He thought that understanding that and living that was the best way to be liberally educated. And he was living his advice talking to me.

Instantly my world aligned and everything in it fell into place. Michael Hawley eloquently put my Holy Grail into words. This was my legacy, my image of Success, and my dream. It was through people I would discover the world. It would take me another four years to change my major to Anthropology so that I could formally fully realize the depth and breadth of what it is that we call Humanity. I spent my days volunteering and getting to know all kinds of people. I set out on a journey to adventure my way across the span of what it means to be Human. Michael Hawley's spark grew as I journeyed until it raged; it was passion and obsession, an idea, and I understood it would take the rest of my life to complete.

I began to understand culture in a new light. It didn’t exist in exotic world travels. It existed everywhere around me. Culture wasn’t a place, it was people. People weren’t a place, they were a culture. I soaked up everything I could learn from anyone. It took me on many journey’s through all kinds of lives that have been lived.

I have met all sorts of people. All as valuable as the last. I’ve logged more miles than many seasoned travelers in my own backyard. I’ve sat and talked with people from all walks of life. From each I learned something new. Slowly, I am seeing the world the way I was meant to see it: through the eyes of those who have experienced it in a different way than I. Their stories are profound, silly, sorrowful and endearing. I have barely begun this journey; soon it will take me to Asia and after that, who knows? This is the journey of my life and I will spend the rest of it in pursuit of this adventure.

Do not therefore consider this life as an object of any moment. Look back on the immense gulf of time already past; and forwards, to that infinite duration yet to come, and you will find how trifling the difference is between a life of three days and of three ages. 

Let us then employ properly this moment of time allotted us by fate, and lave the world contentedly; like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations