Stars and Constellations: Patrick Reyes

Welcome to Callings, a podcast of NetView, the network for vocation in undergraduate education. featuring conversations on college, career, and a life well lived. I'm Erin Van Lanningham. And I'm Hannah Schell. And we invite you to explore with us. and our guests, the process of discovering one's vocation. We approach the subject with eagerness and humility and the recognition that a diversity of viewpoints, religious and secular,

Influence How We Understand Vocation. Through these conversations, we hope to offer listeners better ways to understand how discerning one's purpose and connection with others is central to a meaningful life. Our guest today is Patrick Reyes. Patrick is Senior Director of Learning Design at the Forum for Theological Education and the author of a new book titled The Purpose Gap, Empowering Communities of Color to Find Meaning and Thrive.

The book offers a counter to much of the scholarship about the search for meaning and purpose, which often does not sufficiently account for the fact that many people do not have the resources and opportunities to fulfill their purposes in life. His previous book, Nobody Cries When We Die, God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood, was selected by the Children's Defense Fund as the first book for its book club in 2019.

Patrick is president-elect of the Religious Education Association, and he's the host of the podcast, The Sound of the Genuine. Patrick, welcome to Collings. We're honored to have you here and for this chance to talk with you.

Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Well, we want to get started by asking you about your own story of calling. Was there a time when you experienced a sense of calling? In other words, is there a particular moment of epiphany, a setback, a crossroads in your life that you can point to? And how did you come to do the work you are currently doing?

Yeah, I think this has been the challenge or this has been at least what I tried to address in The Purpose Gap where my first book, I was really doing my own interpretation of my story around all those moments of calling, whether it was... The Christian Brothers really saved my life from domestic abuse and gang violence and all that stuff growing up back in Salinas, California.

to my grandma taking me into the house, to the places of higher education, the challenges I saw. It was a bunch of little calling moments, right? The Purpose Gap is kind of a correction to my own story, to my own way of thinking about vocation and calling where, you know, I open it with the story of, you know, I'm out here talking about vocation, meaning, and purpose.

major university one that I went to I feel very proud to be from and talking to students like myself first generation Latinos and getting excited about and I come out and my dad you know tells me the story about how You know, my cousin passed away. And...

I had reflected on my cousin in the first book and our time with my grandma in her house and my grandma's reminder, which I had left out of that book, that the bed I was sleeping in wasn't mine. It could have been his as well. It could have been anyone's in our family. And thinking about what a wonderful kind of correction she offered to me around vocation, meaning, and purpose really is a communal act. It's about...

Being part of a longer ancestral tradition, being part of a community and being a good ancestor, you know, what is the seeds we're, you know, planting today for future generations to come. My own sort of sense of awakening was really, if I had to have a moment, it was that moment where I was just, and I had lost friends, I had lost family members before, but this was something that was so, he was brilliant, kind.

dude just like me, bald like me, you know, like all the things, there was no reason why he shouldn't be here having this conversation with you. So, out of that, I kind of... started to think, wait, there's probably another way to think about vocation that's not so individualistic, that maybe it is about how do we both get here? How do we bring up community along? How do we think about the call of multiple people? And, you know, just...

even how I reframe myself. You know, I used to do the introduction, the beautiful introduction he did of me very similarly. That's how I'd introduce myself, my own title. my own work, whatever I was up to. And now I've been introducing myself as sitting between five generations of Carmelitas. There's a Carmelita five generations back, then my grandmother's name is Carmelita, my daughter's name is Carmelita, and five generations will be another one.

that carries their spirit. And that's a lot, it's humbling to know that that's how I'm coming to the sense of call or vocation or even my approach to work. And life is that really it's couched in that five generational gap that I'm just here doing my best to be a good ancestor, be a good descendant, and just be a good human in this moment.

So we wanted to have several questions to ask you about the book. And just for people who haven't read it, can you just, you know, give us a thumbnail sketch and talk to us about this landscape of privilege that you see in vocational conversations and what it means to kind of... forge a path through what you describe as the purpose, the purpose gap. Yeah, one of my biggest challenges around vocation, at least is, you know, this goes back to my doctoral work where I was working with...

folks who we now call essential workers. I went back home and worked in the fields and asked my family, friends, community members, what in their spiritual and religious lives kept them alive through hard labor to... do this. And just as last year, we saw that. I mean, these are folks like my dad or family who are going to work in the midst of fires, a COVID pandemic to put food on our plates, literally, so we can eat and survive. They're out there risking their lives for minimum wage.

So, I've been intrigued by this question around what does it mean to find meaning always from those who are on the brink, from those who are just trying to make ends meet. And what I was struggling with is the one who... made it out, the one who got to go to school, that everything I was reading around vocation, around meaning, around designing my life, all these great books that were about how do you find your purpose?

They were so egocentric. They were so about one person, about me. And, you know, I make the claim in the book, you know, a lot of it draws from Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. Like everyone's on a very... kind of similar trajectory. I mean, even David Brooks' most recent one, the second mountain is about...

a second hero's journey. You get a second one, you know, there's not just one, you get two. Okay, cool. You know, like it's still a framework that to me left out so many people that, you know, that, that, kind of arc for those who are not familiar with it is, you know, you get an enunciation. Someone speaks a call, you get a call to adventure. You know, this is Frodo getting the ring and saying, you got to go destroy this thing.

And you go on this journey, you get mentors, resources, friends, even small challenges that you can overcome. So that way you can gain new skills. So that way when you have to fight that dragon or graduate from that school or get that job, whatever that peak of your...

mountain is, that you can achieve that. And then, of course, you're coming back down the other side, and I think the professorate and academic administrators are great for this. Let me share my wisdom after all my wins. As I go down, I have something to share with you as I return home.

As I'm sitting at the bar, you know, or, you know, sitting with my students, let me impart my wisdom. And then, of course, there's that kind of death, retirement, or reimagining. If you're David Brooks and you get a second mountain, you know, here's your second enunciation, get a second call.

And for me, that just didn't work because the upside down version of that, and if you flip that mountain upside down, is a gap. You know, some of us don't get a call. Some of us don't get resources, mentors, access to those things, those challenges.

is just to not bottom out you know like the hitting rock bottom is the thing and then we're just trying to crawl back up to status quo so that way the next generation can do exactly what we did to serve another someone else who's crawling up their second mountain whatever it might be you know we're sherpas for the the you know greater capitalist economy whatever however you want to term that

But there's some of us that have been deemed to the sideline, that have been so marginalized that that hero's journey didn't work. So I said, there's got to be something. I got to do something. digging in my own work and my own family, my own communal stories. My grandmother had stories, you know, we had traditions and practices that just were never central to my own education system. So doing that research and...

really trying to write it down saying, there's got to be some other way of telling this story that is not about just me, that is about bringing a community along. And I was really fortunate that there was a lot of wisdom. in my family, in my community, in my own ancestral lineage, in my own kind of knowledge banks that to me was just missing from the data, just missing from the way that we talk about vocation, meaning, and purpose.

I was happy to explore that, but that was the challenge I was really addressing was that hero's journey does not count, does not mean much for those who never get that call in the first place. Yeah.

Yeah, and as part of constructing this alternative narrative, a new narrative, I appreciated so much all of the scenes you paint for us from California. especially the references to Yosemite from your childhood and also later in life. You have a wonderful image of the night sky. that you use as a metaphor for the way we think about community. And I'm going to quote from the book here. You ask...

What if we stopped focusing on these stars and instead thought about us all as belonging to constellations in the universe? I want us to begin to think about how to move us from this exceptional... or STAR model to thinking about how to benefit the community, the common good. Can you talk about the constellation metaphor and communal vocation? Yeah, I mean, I, for me... The image I'm using is really, I mean, I get to see it now where I am in Santa Fe. We look at a full night sky every night.

Being in higher education, as I have been, my entire academic after I got my PhD, I've been squarely either in the academy or academy adjacent, like what I do now, supporting grants and fellowships. for DIA stuff and FT's own work. We've had a fellowship to support scholars of color since 1968. And what I saw in all of these models was an extraction model. We like to find the best and the brightest. We even use that term.

that we try to find that one exception to the rule for people of color. Because we're, I mean, if we look at, you know, my field is, you know, the theological education, you know, it's a 270. graduate schools that do some form of seminary or theological training. I do a lot of work with the Council of Graduate Schools that does a lot more.

you know, broader nursing, legal, a whole bunch of other things. And all of these cases, the same thing when it comes to people of color, it's not about... changing to represent just the demographics to match the demographics of the the local areas even that the school's in but it's really about how do we find that one great if i'm going to speak about myself that one great latino chicano who can come in and tell us about

X, Y, and Z. We're not going to change. We're not going to make this a Latino or Chicano institution, but we're going to have this one program or this one person. It's an extraction model. We want to find that one bright shining star that can make it in this system. Because what we've all agreed on is this system somehow works for some people because obviously we're all here.

So if we can just find a few more people of color to just fill this who can make it at this, then we'll be all right. And to me, that's such a problem. It's so problematic and so... challenging and it doesn't just do damage to i think white institutions primarily white institutions it does damages the scholars of color i work with because now the the the kind of dehumanization the decontextualization the d

you know, communitization. I don't know. That's actually a word, you know, I'm an academic, so maybe I can just make it up and claim it. But the, you know, this idea that they are exceptional, that they are the brightest star and they deserve this like solo platform. They're not going to.

bring anyone along. They're not going to bring their colleagues along. They're not going to mentor. They're not going to change the conditions because that invitation to speak or write that book or serve in that endowed chair or become the dean. They've made it on behalf of everyone else. And I see that as so damaging to the way that actually for me, the way I was raised, that's not how we were raised to be. We were raised to bring our whole family along with all of our problems.

you know, bring us all along? How do you bring your family, friends? How do you support each other? And my whole idea around this from stars to constellations or single stars to constellations is that I would have these moments. I still have them when I go to places that don't have light pollution, that aren't artificial, kind of like our institutions, but that are really trying to draw on our natural wellsprings. And I'm looking up at a night sky.

filled with so many stars. And I really have a hard time paying attention to any one of them because I'm so overwhelmed by the beauty. And I think about that as a metaphor for what we could be doing, especially in higher education. where we get to put together literally a constellation. That's what our faculty is. That's what our student body is. We get to construct, design that constellation.

We don't have to play this game where we're trying to find the bright star amongst that constellation. We really got to celebrate how are we piecing these things together and how are we operating? together and seeing that as our work. And for me, that to me is just such a wonderful reorienting. And I'll just say this for those who want to read the book, one of the things that where Yosemite came up was,

You know, I host deans and presidents and directors of doctoral programs and doctoral faculty and students all the time. And I spent all this... time going to hotel conference rooms and convention centers in the most boring places with no windows, listening to people read at me.

Not even like children's books, like reading boring papers. I mean, that doesn't mean that I don't get excited about the words they put together, but I could have read that. I mean, I have a lot of education. I can read that out loud. So I wanted to take...

these faculty members, these deans and these presidents to a place where they could see a constellation, like literally see what does it look like to be overwhelmed by the stars? What does it mean to get your time back to dream big dreams together? to reorient ourselves, not stuck in the process-oriented hotel ballroom, but to really walk together in the wild and say like, we can't look.

And what we're doing has perspective. That's the other thing. It's like, you know, I know when I'm in those hotel ballrooms, like this is the most important work. You know, no one else understands how important we are because we're on the microphone. But when you're standing in the Yosemite Valley.

which you know has a longer history than any humans and you can you can see the indigenous um people in the cultural center that's there and you can kind of feel the energy that it doesn't belong to you can see these huge mountains that don't belong to you cannot control them when you see the night sky that's so filled

with stars that you don't get in your cities and definitely don't get in that hotel ballroom, it gives you some perspective like, wow, like maybe I'm overthinking how to do this work. Like it's really about stopping. and being present to the constellation that's already in front of me and celebrating this moment together. I really do encourage listeners to pick up.

this book and read it there's a lot of threads to this and we're only going to be able to touch on some of them but one is kind of you know threaded throughout this theme of educational freedom and a certain understanding of what education should be or you know could be um so there's a place in here where you say um The purpose of education is not to gather and regurgitate facts and white history. Education's purpose is to heal and find freedom.

we must not only prepare students to return home, we must also value the education they first received at home. And this is in a chapter called The Hardest Place to Take the Work is Home. So, I mean... This just is such a challenge to how we think about learning and an invitation to, you know, really...

begin to value the knowledge that our students, you know, bring with them that they have already. And so I just wanted to hear you say a little bit more about that. And then also, given... all of the crises that have erupted in the last 18 months, not just the pandemic, but of course that too, you know, what does that mean for being an educator of some kind today? Sort of think about educational freedom and the ways that you direct us to think about it. Yeah, what I...

Love about this question. And I think about the context for probably your listeners, the Council of Independent Colleges or folks who are serving in institutions of higher education. You know, one of the things I... especially as someone who works with a lot of folks of color, a lot of students of color, faculty of color, deans and administrators. There's always an exhaustion about what the challenge is to either learn in these institutions or serve in these institutions.

And what I actually think is really cool about higher education, and I wish more people had access to, I mean, where else do you get the time? to experiment, to learn with peers, to like sit down and do some of that deep work for four years, you know, two to three years if you're doing a master's and seven to, you know, forever if you're doing a PhD and beyond.

You know, I think what a great opportunity we have and what a waste of time if you're downloading information for four years. You know, what a waste of server space in your brain and in your spirit. You know, if we could really lean in and tap into that and rethink some of the things, like, you know, the model is, you know, sharing best practices or sharing this is what's working at our institution or how we're leading these classrooms or this is the best pedagogical practice.

And I mean, that's just boring. Like if we had all of these, if we had the, you know, what is it? 5,000 plus colleges and universities across this country. Just doing the same thing, offering the same degrees in the same way, erasing regional differences, erasing differences that students bring to the classroom. erasing resources and capital that they have in those, like an ag sector looks very different than a tech sector school. Like if we can really lean into the...

diversity of our schools. And this goes back to that last question around the constellation. If we saw, let's take the U.S. higher education system as a constellation, What are the ways that we are activating as a constellation, as a collaborative of colleges and universities, advancing knowledge and wisdom of our people, everyone who exists in our borders? what a cool opportunity we have. And that is not to make it the same. It's not to use best practices. It really is to find

ways to be as different and differentiate ourselves from each other as possible, because I don't want to be doing what you're doing. If I'm doing what you're doing, why am I doing it? And it's a waste of time. Like I'll just send my students to you. You can do it. You're probably doing it better than me. So I just think about this. higher education. This is really what I was trying to say in that chapter about bringing your work home is

You know, that's where that disconnect between our communities as students, as faculty really exists. You know, when we go out, we leave our communities and we go into what are predominantly white Western ways of educating. you know, whether it's mathematics, STEM, it doesn't really matter. I mean, Latinos, if I'm going back to

different ways of teaching Aztec history or Nahua history. Like there's ways of teaching language and mathematics and philosophy that comes directly from my people, from my lineage. If that was being taught to me, there'd be less of a disconnect when I came home to talk to my dad about what I do. But instead, I go to these institutions, I learn this whole new skill set that has no real practical application.

back home. And so I'm trying to make that leap. I'm trying to cross that gap to try to say, this matters. I went off. I did exactly what you said. I got all these education, all these degrees. I'm doing this really cool work. And yet it doesn't benefit my community. And what I say in the book is one of the data sets I draw on is, you know, Bloomberg has a brain concentration index. They literally track how people...

who get higher education degrees, who get degrees where they end up flowing, where they end up doing. It's to major metros. So a place like Salinas, which is an education desert, someone like myself does not go back. I'm not back. All this stuff that I'm doing, there's a challenge of taking it home, literally, because there's no jobs, there's no way for me to translate the stuff that I'm learning in the academy back home. And what if we reimagine this as...

My job as student or my job even as faculty member or researcher is not to go back home and take what I learned in the academy, but maybe I'm supposed to augment, supplement, research. reimagine the stuff of my community in this four-year space that I got as a student or a two-year space if I'm doing master's or my PhD, my seven-year space. So that way, when I go back home,

they see a reflection of themselves. Like, yeah, that's still Pat who we send out, you know, like that to do this work. And he brought something really back that benefits us because his challenge that he had. It's home.

So I wanted to ask you about audience. And by way of talking about audience, I want to focus on the role of reflective questions. One really excellent and helpful part of the book is that you incorporate reflective questions throughout the book after every chapter, but even within chapters. So I wanted to ask you about how you understand the role of reflective questioning in vocational exploration more broadly. And then also, how are you imagining these questions?

being used by your audience. And maybe you can unpack that a little bit for us. Yeah. So questions, I mean, to me is that, I mean, if you pick up on the thing, vocation is not done. in silence. It's not discerning my own purpose, you know, alone and all that stuff. It really is in conversation and in community. And so the questions are really an invitation.

For folks to understand, to wrestle with the content I was putting together for their own context, for their own work, for their own place in the world. Because I feel very strongly that vocation is done in community, which I know is very different from...

A lot of the literature, which is about finding that still small voice or, you know, I have this podcast sound the genuine in you. It's not in everybody else. It's just in you, you know, so there's a. the questions are an invitation to be in conversation, not just with me, the author and the words that are putting down, but to be in conversation with themselves and the community there.

working with? Because some of those questions that I offer up, you cannot answer yourself. I mean, you have to ask someone else. You need to get another perspective on it. And even if that perspective is... You know, in one of the sections I offer a meditation I often do with doctoral students, or even I've done it with presidents of universities, for them to get in touch with someone that loves them more than anything and hear the words that only...

that person can say to them, because there's some people that can just speak truth to us that we don't hear from anyone else. And so, that sort of invitation to be reflective, to be in conversation both with ourselves and with our larger community is the way that we do. vocational discernment. And I think for a lot of leaders today, especially academic leaders, these are presidents and deans and even faculty members who have aspirations of that.

getting into that habit and practice of questioning your own assumptions, questioning your own sense of call. Am I called to do this? is to me like a very necessary intervention in our field. It's a necessary intervention on how we do vocational call. I think along with the heroes... journey myth there's that myth of the you know warrior king I say that you know like the the person who's got it all figured out like of course I was called to be president of this

I was called to be president of this college. I'm the only one who's ever been called. It's not really true. So there was other ones before you got like the pictures up on the wall to prove it. And so like being able to be in conversation about whether or not this is actually what I'm supposed to be doing at all and, and being okay with the answer being no. Like I, you know, you did the introduction. I'm senior director of learning design at.

the form for theological exploration, I know for a fact I will not die that. Like, I'm not going to work here forever. I have some humility around, like, I'm not going to be at FTE for my entire career. But I'm going to do the best I can with this right now. And I'm going to be in constant conversation with my boss, our president, Stephen Lewis, who's one of the most inspiring leaders I have ever met. My colleagues, my team, my direct reports around, we were just talking today about...

You know, what does it mean to be called to work? You know, like at this work for this time, not forever, for just right now in this sliver. And what do you want to do long-term? Not, it's probably not FT. If it's FT, that's cool. If it's not FT, let's talk about where you want to go and let's make these things work. And for me, this is the conversation that college faculty members are doing all the time with their students.

So for me, this is not a new habit. I mean, if I'm thinking about the higher education thing, this kind of reflective practice, how are you thinking about your own sense of call? You know, helping it reframe it back in community, be in conversation with that and don't settle on like, I know this is what I'm called to do. It really takes a little bit of...

Humility. And that's not to say that when people give you feedback, they're always right either. I mean, I say that in the book too. I mean, like, you know, some people just out here to just... challenge stuff or you know they're you know if i'm thinking about the dom miguel ruiz stuff you know the four agreements you know not everything's about you they might be giving feedback that has nothing to do with you but if you're in a position where you can receive that feedback for whatever it is

and kind of start putting the pieces together, put together your own mosaic around what does my life look like in connection with my community, with the people I'm around, the places I exist, the practices I like to do. the many purposes in my life, I'm going to have a better sense of life balance because my sense of purpose, my sense of call is in this conversation that doesn't just...

you know, put it in the work category or put it in the family category or put it in the, you know, I'm living here in this place category. It's about all these things in conversation. When I was reading the book, I...

I really loved the questions because it made me stop and pause. And then it did make me think, geez, I would love, I want to talk about these with someone else. So the idea about... kind of discerning in community with those questions, I think kind of bears out just even in the reading of the book.

As a reader, when I was working my way through it the first time, you know, the fact that the reflection questions don't just come at the end of a chapter, right? Because that's, you know, sort of seen that like, okay, pause, but they'll even sometimes come right in the middle.

You know, if you stop and you're like, okay, read them, it forces you to just kind of change your relationship to the book, like in sort of like pause and say like, okay, given what's just come in the... pages right before what does this all mean you know i mean so it really kind of slows you down anyway i just yeah one of the things i really like about this book is just is the reflection questions um so and i like this idea that they're prompts for talking to someone else about them right

They're not just for you to sit and journal about. Can we give a quick preview for folks? So there's one that I really like. There's one set that I think is really pertinent for all readers. you know, even for folks of color and for white folks too, is the chapter about cultural commutes. And this idea around having to stop and think about your commute, whether it's your physical commute to your campus or to your...

work or to, you know, those extracurricular activities or the cultural commute you have to do into that faculty meeting. I mean, I remember my first faculty meeting, that was like one of the longest walks I've ever done. Like, holy moly, there's a whole set of conversations that have been going on for... 20 years that I just walked into and no one gave me a roadmap for someone. That would have been really nice to know those two have been arguing about the same thing once a month.

for 20 years. That's helpful. But I think some of these, the moment I have in there is to really reflect for readers. Think about your own commute. What is your, not just your physical commute, but what's your cultural commute? How are you connected?

culturally to your institution? Do you fit vocationally? It was really an invitation for folks to think about their own practice of walking in the world, walking in the skin that they do. And I think for me, At least those types of questions, rather than just give the theoretical, this is what the cultural community means in the theory world or sociology world, but what does it mean for us as embodied people?

who really have to take inventory. If I was a little more intentional about how I designed my commute, how I think about where I go and how I operate in this world. I might be able to make some choices that make the world a more loving and better place or my classroom, a more inclusive space or whatever that commute they were discerning individually could do. It's one of my favorite ones because, you know, I've...

I love Google Maps. I love designing commutes. I love picking new roads and all that kind of stuff. So anyways. I have the exact questions right here and I can read them for listeners. It is from the chapter on designing purpose. And you ask, what is the distance between your starting place and your destination? Was the commute designed to ease your work and life purpose?

What is the distance between your culture and dominant culture? What was the cultural commute of your ancestors? How would you redesign your commute? How would you reimagine your cultural commute to serve you? and the generation coming behind you.

One of the other reflection sections that caused me to, stopped me in my tracks as a reader, comes kind of early on in the retelling the story of purpose chapter. And it's long. It's really a meditation where you invite people to... kind of go through a process of sort of centering, breathing in, and then imagine the face of someone who loves you more than anything.

Along the lines of what you were just saying, you sort of build this in. And then what would they say to you? You know, words that probably only they could say to you. And you talk about how this was something you learned from your grandmother and that you do with your daughter.

And I have to say, when I first read this, I was like, wow, this is strange. I did not see this coming. And then as I kept reading... I could begin to see how the theme of love and also the theme of your ancestors and their love for you. And then plays out in terms of obligation and, you know, what we do for the future is another thread all the way through this book, even when you're talking about other things, right? Once you sort of think about this theme of love. And...

I mean, love is one of those words that we, you know, sometimes think, especially in Christian circles, throw around maybe a little bit too easily. And this gives it some teats, some specificity, right? The face of someone who loves you. want to say more about that and why you included this uh and you also mentioned that

This is, I think, on your website too, right? The guided meditation, if listeners want to go get the whole of it. It's one of my favorite practices. I mean, I do it with my kids when they go to bed. My kids are eight and four now. I've been doing it with... Asher, the oldest one, my son, for the last five years. And it's been a real reimagining around how to do this. And I mean, I tell a story later in the book about...

Like all college students, young adults, when I was living with them, broke up with a girl. I was distraught. A friend had just passed away the week before. I was just a wreck. And my grandmother had... Invite me into her backyard to slow down, to sit down in this chair. And as she's letting me just spout off like, you know, late teens, early adults, young adults do.

And she, we see this butterfly fly over our piece. And she reminds me of the, she starts telling me a story about how butterflies, you know, are like our family. They migrate with us in the way that we have from. us to mexico or actually before it was even a border bordered space you know that this is actually our homeland and we follow these beautiful creatures and

And she tells me about the time that she was blessed when it landed on her. And in the same conversation, the butterfly lands on me in the stillness because I didn't want this butterfly to leave me. And so I'm sitting in this nice still moment and then a...

you know hummingbird which is sacred to my people flies back over and she's asked me to slow down enough to see if I can see a flapping wings and what we know about hummingbirds you can't do that our eyes don't work that fast but I was trying really hard so I'm still I'm quiet I'm

wrestling with all this. And that invitation, that practice mirrors what happened in my grandmother's backyard, that love that my grandma had. And what I'm trying to do in the book, at least, is to offer to leaders, presidents, deans, faculty members. When you're so overwhelmed,

The response, our response mechanism, that fight or flight kicks in. We're operating on that limbic system where we shoot off that email a little too quickly or we call our board for just way too like an emergency meeting that probably was not an emergency.

Or we're sitting with that one student who's just frantic and we don't know what to do because we're trying to publish that next article or get that book out on deadline, you know, whatever it may be, or that presentation, whatever we're trying to do. And I think that... In higher education, if we could tap into what I thought was my grandma's love, my grandma's wisdom, when I'm making decisions about grants or fellowships or process or just thinking about organizing.

If I'm feeling that overwhelmness to move it to that prefrontal cortex space, my grandma has a practice. She had a practice that she taught us to say like, hey, my best advice was not. coming from the how to solve any of these problems. I mean, anyone who does conflict management stuff knows once you agree on the problem, the solution normally arises pretty quickly. It's really about settling yourself enough to

actually address and find out what that problem is. And that takes slowing down. This takes being present with the ancestors. So, this practice for me was really about how do we as leaders teach ourselves to slow down and hear the words that we need to hear?

from the people who need to be able to say it to us. And that always starts with me, like for my grandma who just loved me more than anything, that she would start with that. I knew that I could share anything with her. And I knew I was going to get the honest feedback because at the end of the day, I always had to bed. I always had food. I always had love. I always had that hug that I needed. And now when I'm making decisions, even though I'm in higher education and...

You know, I'm sitting on this committee with a student who's trying to get their dissertation right now. And I'm like reading through his dissertation and it's all the usual stuff, like really challenging with. writing and the citation i mean just all this and life is overwhelming and i sit there and i think about i go back to this meditation around well if it was my grandma offering advice it was my grandma sitting here

offering me advice as an advisor, she would start with, I love you. And then she'd be looking at my face and saying, like, it's not that stressful. Like this is, you'll be okay. And this person will be okay. If she was offering advice, if she was sitting on this thing, what are the ways she would help redirect?

this energy that's being clearly spent in the wrong place, you know, for this student. And so, I just, I think about these practices that we have in our tradition, if we could teach those, and a lot of us try to do, I mean, I don't know how many. College and universities, you know, in their values or in sometimes straight in the mission statement, critical thinking, problem solving, you know, like these things that we say we do is higher education.

If we actually tapped into these deeper, I mean, I know you said love. I mean, love is a weird word to use, but if we tapped into how do we love our people? How do we love this planet? How do we love our descendants? We might find different solutions. We might build different curriculums if we operate out of that place instead of what's going to keep our doors open or what's going to drive enrollment.

I just think people will come. My grandma's house was never empty. Why? Because she was not pitching a program. She was just telling everyone when they walked through her thing how loved they were, no matter what BS they brought across the threshold of her house. You're a distinguished guest. You're loved here. And I just think about...

Higher education, we have all these resources. We have all this access to wisdom. We actually have a credentialing system that says you could be taught and formed in how to love your community. Now, we say it different ways, like, you know, capacity building or... business development, or pick any of your degree categories. But if we really reframe that in terms of how are we going to love our planet, our people, our places, our practices, how we're going to be together.

I mean, I think the whole higher education space has a real opportunity to make a huge, huge, huge impact on people and this planet, which is sorely needed. You just reminded me of, you're right, we don't tend to use the word love, or it's not been my experience that love is used in faculty meetings or committee meetings in higher ed, right? People would just look at you strangely.

But it's there in the commitment of faculty and staff to students. And I remember once I was on this kind of subcommittee. It was one of these things where, like, there was a president who would sort of... divided people up and we each had something that we had to work on. But what was great about it is that it sort of crossed the silos of campus. So I was in this little room with the dean of students and then some people in student affairs and then some other faculty members.

don't even remember what we were talking about or what our particular task was, but the woman at the time who was the vice president for student affairs, Jackie Condon, said, and I think she surprised herself in saying it, I love our students.

even before I meet them, even before they arrive on campus. I mean, she was sort of tapping into... this calling that I think all of us around the table felt to not just our current students but what it means to be a part of this college and I was so moved by it. And also, I knew exactly what she was talking about. But that was an unusual moment, you know, in the life of meetings. So, but thanks for that memory. Hannah.

I just want to pick up what you're talking about, too, about the sort of scarcity of the language of love in the academy a little bit. And I do think there is an emergent discourse. that Patrick's conveying, obviously, but there's also this language of generosity, I think, that is coming forward. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has this book, Generous Thinking, that I think...

Patrick, you referenced some of her work. And there's just also, you know, the language of limits of critique. And I think that this is a potential place where the scholarship of vocation and... the ways in which we structure ourselves and talk about what we're all doing. We're at maybe a turning point or a breaking point.

push hard enough with generosity and love, which is sort of a different pose that might kind of bring us forward in some way. Yeah. I mean, I think about all the advances that we're making in... higher education and the technological, uh, in the science STEM fields. Um, you know, that's my first professional job is performance-based logistics. I just think about the ways that mathematics can help us really.

you know, tailor human performance or machine performance and all this other stuff. And I just, I got this image as this book came out and I started, you know, kind of getting out on this thing around talking about love, you know, how will we know? that we're doing this work well? How will we know that we're loving folks? And you know, in the book, I'm limited to a day.

How do we track the practices of our day? Do they express the love for our people, the place that we live on, and all that kind of stuff? And I was out speaking on, well, I shouldn't say out. I was on a... podcast similar to this because, you know, we're not traveling anymore because of this stuff. And that same day, you know, we know when it's not right. And we were watching the news in a global pandemic.

where we have racial strife just going crazy in this country because of all the violence that we've seen in this last year and the protests and the challenges. We're seeing unparalleled ecological destruction on this planet that is... detrimental to future generations and in the midst of all that a billionaire boards his own penis rocket and shoots it into space

in spite of the rest of the world. So, like, I was sitting on a call like this and we're like, I'm seeing the little news feeds that, you know, it's gone up into space and I'm thinking, that's when we know it's not love. That's operating maybe out of self-love, like I'm a billionaire, I can do this, and I'm going to try to make you think that this is going to have benefits for the rest of the planet, but if all that money and resources that were spent to put that man in space...

were to better all of our communities. A lot of our problems in this last year, the pandemic, all these things that we've been going through, the real challenges, even the higher education, the money to go back into R&D in higher education spaces with people who are actually training to do great STEM work. great STEM research, the stuff that Bezos was talking about. We would be in a better place. We would be in a loving place. And I just don't know how.

If I'm looking at my last chapter, which is, you know, how do you know that you've arrived at your purpose? How do you know that this moment of all this love that you've generated from your ancestors to future descendants?

It's all boiled down to a day. What are you spending your time on? Praxis? Who are the people you're spending with? It's really about to take an inventory of like, what does purpose look like at the daily level, daily living? And I try to do that from a Latino's perspective. You know, the friends I'm calling, the...

great cup of coffee I make because I just love a great cup of coffee. Like all this stuff that I put in there about reimagining my purpose so that way people have access to their resources and ability to do and dream their big dreams. I don't know on the counterpoint. How a man wakes up in the morning and says, no one gave me feedback that my rocket probably should be redesigned because it's an ugly design that's clearly just someone. Someone was not honest with him.

I'm going to board a rocket. I'm going to fly into space for two minutes and I'm going to call this a huge success for all of mankind. Like I just, I don't know how. That's living into someone's purpose. I don't know how that's living into, if you're going to bring up Fitzpatrick's work, generous thinking about how this benefits the common good or the greater whole. How is this, you know, reimagining vocation as benefiting a community? This is...

one dude's spending way too much money on himself in a way that is just disgusting when people, 600,000 people in this country had died. Like I just, I don't, I don't do the math. I don't understand how he does the math. And so my hope was that.

That's a very... His rocket got a lot more attention than the purpose cap did. I'm not saying that that's not wrong, but... I do think that we need a groundswell, like a movement of people in higher education who are really committed to rethinking this because our students...

The people that we work with, they see that and they go, that's what I want. I want fame. I want notoriety. I want to do something that's big that people, I want to build a pyramid. I want people to remember me forever. And that's not what we actually. That's not how I frame vocation. I say, going back to that very beginning introduction, sitting between five generations commonly to, I have deep, deep understanding that unless Ancestry.com comes a long way from where it is, that that...

Carmelita in five generations from now may never know my name, may never read my books, may not know any of the work I did on the daily level to make her life better. But my deep hope is that all the work that I have been doing in community, in partnership, that she somehow feels that love that we put in so that way she knows that the conditions that she's living in are better than what previous generations have. And in this case, you know, just a hospitable planet.

the resources she has to dream those big dreams that she wants to dream, to live into all of her many purposes and calls. And that's going to take a lot, a lot of work and groundswell work that has to be not about me. It has to be about bringing along people. It has to be about bringing along our communities and to dream different dreams. I want to circle back and ask you about design and designing purpose.

which among other things, sometimes is used in vocation circles to talk about the idea that we can design our lives like a blank slate, which... Obviously has a lot of limitations, but what I like about your book is that it's bringing forward also the complications about how much agency. we may actually have in that process. I appreciated that you were talking about design on multiple levels, the individual act as well as the literal design of public spaces, interstates.

educational institutions. And I wanted to specifically follow up and ask you about the ways that you're wanting to invite people into the conversation about design. and what it means to design communal purpose or individual purpose within that and how you want to kind of reformulate that for us.

Yeah, my challenge in that section was really to reframe that we should not be mirroring what the 1% do. It was a challenge to... you know, the good old Daves at Stanford, who out of an engineering background, design background, who have a lot of success or, you know, most successful, most enrolled program at Stanford, design your life.

And there's similar ones, you know, Yale's got their joy and happiness and NYU's got theirs and all of these things around meaning and purpose. These are led by someone typically in the sciences or business that are reframing.

you know, this idea that you can design your life, you can find your life's call. And they're using all these kind of white men wisdom from their experience in business. They're not referencing the humanities. They're not referencing the stories of our people. They're not doing any of this.

And so I say, like, my challenge really about that is that they, I mean, not just didn't take inventory of the land in which they sit, the stories that they, this is going back to the, you know, the stories that we tell our folks, that our people, our students. was really to say that they were talking to a very specific, very small group of people that have access to resources where they can do that.

If you're an undergraduate student at Stanford, you have access to certain resources and job opportunities. Outcomes, you're probably not working a full-time job while you're going to school. That's not the way it's set up. It's set up to be a residential campus where you can discern your many callings, your many purposes, your many degrees. And really...

It's a self-filtering mechanism that they have in the institution. If you don't make in this program, you got to switch the other one, but it's insular. It's for them. And I was saying, you know, I'm seeing this movement in higher education towards, oh, that's so cool. We should have our version of that.

Well, I went to Sac State, you know, this California State Sacramento. It's an access college university. It was my first, you know, it's one of the first places to, one of the first people in my family to go to school. I was working a full-time job, working the night shift or the early morning shift so I could make it to class on time. That stuff that's in that book, the way that they imagine their thing, I mean, I just...

One, there's no time. I have no resources and I don't have the networks because I'm going straight from my job, which is right down the street at Home Depot at the time, to class, stinky, smelly, sweaty. I did the same thing in my graduate program, working instruction. I just don't get...

the time and access to resources in the same way. So it was a reframe to say like, what does that actually look like if we're going to take a wider look at what does meaning design look like? And it was like a... There's some great books out there like Design Justice that were really saying we can take a broader look at design, just in general, design as a category, to move it away from the kind of production.

you know, the mechanistic way of thinking about design. And for me, as a Latino, as a Chicano, as someone from California, I think about, whoa, like even in all the design literature. It's never referencing any indigenous design, anything that's indigenous to me or my people or to the space in which those institutions sit on. It's always about some other thing that only exists in these great, brilliant minds and their imagination.

You know, and for me, we have a long history of design. Like, we have a deep history of design. Like, it's, you know, Florentine Codex is, that's design. That's not like... That's documented. We all agree that's beautiful and it contains knowledge. So, why doesn't that show up in design literature? We got buildings in Central Mexico that...

We've got, you know, out here where I am in New Mexico, we've got buildings that are inside of, like, the sides of walls, like, out in nature. Like, that's cool. Like, that's design. Why doesn't that show up in the design learn chair? Why aren't we thinking about how... The folks who lived on this land, who are indigenous to this space, designed with the space for...

ways of being together in community, not just as humans, but in nature, not as something to be corrected. This isn't Aristotelian, nature is just waiting for us to put our mark on it. but really to be in design with it. And if we look to design differently as a relation, a set of relationships, as a way to design the multiverse, the pluriverse, where we're all able to exist in cohabitants.

I just think our imagination would be open. I just do a litany in that chapter around like, here's all the artists and designers and novelists that I just absolutely love that have taken me to dream new dreams. you know, BIPOC futurism, like to think about there will be Chicanos in space at some point. You know, like what does that actually look like? That it's not just white dudes in space. So like to be able to dream those things.

that would be indigenous to this space. I just think for me, just offered up such a cool way of rethinking design. That's not so, hey, a couple of white dudes figured it out and the rest of us need to get on board. It's like, no, we had this figured out before you even like landed on this. space on this continent. And you should give a little bit, just you're a scholar. I mean, to me, this is you're a scholar. Do a little bit of research outside of your own self. And so, I just...

I loved, love, love, love that. And I get to work in so many artist communities that it's just when I see what they're creating that's indigenous to our people and to our stories, it's almost a heartbreak. It's a heartbreak for me that...

the rest of the world doesn't have access to it, that we've been so marginalized that these folks who are at these major institutions who are designing their lives or helping young people design their lives are leaving out what to me is a really beautiful contribution of our people.

And that their students are missing out on what design means from our community because we actually have something really important to say. We have longer histories to offer that have just been left out of the record. And, you know, for me...

That is the challenge of scholarship. If you were a good scholar, you would have done that work. So, it's also kind of like my pushback in scholar, like, y'all made me go through this mess. I got like five PhDs in white European history, even if I don't have that. Y'all should know. The equivalent, right? The slogging through. Yeah.

It does really reimagine the canon of what gets read and talked about, I think. I think really, as you read through it, it incorporates so many voices. from people of color and expands the language of vocational discourse in new and important ways and brings forward, you know, ways for us to start to access all of those.

you know, beautiful communities that you've just been talking about, Patrick. I wanted to give you a chance to maybe highlight some of those figures that have been most meaningful for your own thinking and those that you would want to point listeners to sort of initially. Yeah, my favorites right now, I mean, I think Rodolfo Naya, I mean, that's because I'm in New Mexico, because, you know, his book series, you know, between Bless Me Ultima and Albuquerque and all of his writing where he's a...

you know, fiction writer, he's imagining space and connection to this land and really powerful ways. And they're coming of age, coming of age novels. And for me, there's so much. meaning and purpose that you know like i draw parallels between that and tony morrison and octavia butler and folks who are really kind of doing this imagining from

BIPOC perspective and to say these stories, they're not hero's journey. They're more like hero complications. You know, what does it mean to grow up in a traumatized world and try to reimagine?

the complexities of there's no pure story, there's no clear hero or heroine. This is really about how do we reimagine a communal story. So, and I talk about A lot of memoirs, poets, Jimmy Santiago Baca, who again, who's out here in New Mexico, who wrote the foreword for my first book, who's a poet, who learned how to read and write in prison.

And his poetry comes from that national award-winning poet. Like he has something to say, especially in this pandemic, in his poetry about how we might imagine being isolated. I mean, imagine that if we went to folks who were incarcerated, who have, we've locked up tree less than human when so many of us, they have something to teach us and having the humility to listen and sit down and read. So, I try to reimagine some of those poets.

You know, my favorite, when I really think about how do we rewrite the canon, and I say this again and again in the book, this is not to say that the canon that we have is bad. that the literature that I have is not good, that the hero's journey is a bad model. It's just one. Those are some stories. And so what I try to encourage the readers to do is I give my...

Like this is how I'd rewrite the canon, but I also recognize I'm a scholar and all scholars are, we're a little weird. Like we're a weird group of people who studied a lot on a particular thing. So that way we could make it even more particular and weirder. So. My invitation to the readers of The Purpose Gap was really to write their own canon. What are the stories? And to be really, really, really curious.

about where they might find inspiration in other canons, in other people. That is the job of the scholars, not to just know Mine, I feel like people of color got a leg up on most of the majority culture folks on this because we had to know our canon. We also have to know the Western canon. So...

If we can really start doing more of that, where we're engaging across canons and developing these things together, I just... I get so excited about what the creative future, especially as we talk about vocation, main purpose, because this is, to me, less of a science, even though FTE, we have all this science stuff about what's happening in the brain science, what's happening in your spirit.

But if we could be really creative and put it back in the art, in the design, in the kind of way that we do the storytelling about communal living, where we're building villages and not just thinking about the hero's journey, I think... we have an opportunity to rewrite stories. Like we can rewrite the canon. We need to do that because so many of us, myself included, the Purpose Gap, trained in the Western Academy. You know, there's still the fact that I have way too many end notes.

and then an index at the end of that book. Like, it puts it in the academy. I'm still doing a Western way of writing down traditions. That's not the way my grandma taught me. If you're working with my grandma, we'd be in the house and we'd be doing practices together. And so, I think about there's many ways that we can expand the canon in that. Embody practice, writing down the arts, redesigning, and then bringing those things in conversation to each other. That's the practice that gets me.

super excited. It's not about people adopting the bibliography that's in the purpose gap. It's really about how does the bibliography and the purpose gap interact and intersect with the bibliographies people are building.

So, Patrick, at NetView, we're, you know, ultimately committed to helping undergraduates figure all this stuff out, figure life out. And, you know, the world is a mess and young people are... rightly anxious and terrified. So what advice would you give to 18 to 22 year olds right now? I mean, be courageous. I mean, here's the thing. I mean, especially if you're in a BIPOC community, no one's going to give you permission for anything. I've never gotten permission to do anything I wanted to do.

including anything I do for FTE. And half the stuff I do comes, especially that comes out of the imagination that comes from my grandma's lineage because it's not mainline. It takes bold folks creating the way that these systems work. that I try to capture, the education gap, the wealth gap, the opportunity gap, all these many gaps that I try to take account for with statistics. You know, I've talked about the childhood opportunity index, like where you were born.

actually impacts your outcomes, your career outcomes, your life outcomes, your wealth, in ways that we don't always imagine that it would. Or we try to say, you know what, I'm going to be the exception to that. And for me, if I want to rewrite the rules with this broader sense of, or the broader group of young people, 18 to 22 year olds, which FT works with a very similar group, trying to help them discern their call.

My invitation is for them to actually get okay with getting B's or C's in their classes in the Western Canyon. Like, here's the thing. I've written short stories. I've written... you know, way too long monographs. I've done slam poetry. I've done little documentary series. I've played with all kinds of stuff while I was in school.

And I did not get good grades. I had, in my undergraduate experience, I said we had to do this reflection back on our own life journey and all that stuff. And if you read anything, I reflect a lot of my life. I do that a lot. And I went to the professor at the time and I said, hey.

I love the exercise, but I'm still very young. And in my culture, my community, you're not supposed to talk about yourself when you're 18 years old. That's what grandma's job is. I'm supposed to be developing out skills and all this other stuff. That's why I'm here.

can I write in the future tense? Like, can I write about what I will do in the future? And he was like, oh yeah, cool. Totally cool. That's fine. You know, clearly didn't, he had probably 90 students, didn't register the conversation, didn't care. So I write this paper.

get a D minus because he, he writes, he goes, you know, are you an ESL student? You really should send this to it. I asked for a reflection back, you know, gave me the reminder of all stuff. So I sent him the email that we had sent back and forth and said, You know, it was almost two decades ago. I said, this is what we agreed on. And he's like, well, yeah, but that wasn't assignment too bad. So I dropped the class, but.

That sense of risk taking that I wanted to reimagine even that assignment and say, I'm going to level out like this education is for me and my community. This is not an education for that professor. This is not the education that that institution wants. Well, the whole reason why these institutions exist is for me to better my community, to heal my community. If I believe education is about healing, it's about me going to get the practices, skills, knowledge, wisdom, credentials.

that I need to go back home and heal my community. So if I'm leveraging this moment to do that, if I'm a young person, 18, 22 year old, you have a global pandemic, you have global planetary destruction that's going on right now. You know, climate change is real. a racial divide, political divides, whatever that thing is that you feel like is just driving you anxious, like pay attention to that and start saying like, hey, if this is really something that's calling me.

calling my attention. I don't care if it's astrophysics or if it's English lit. I'm going to try to think about this question and try to solve this. And dream with other people who have a similar dream to solve this issue, to address this issue. And I think that takes courage from a student perspective. That takes a lot of courage because you go into these institutions and say, here's your track.

Here's your counselor who's going to make sure that you check off all the boxes. You get enough credits to graduate. That's how I went to my undergraduate. And there's something that has to happen parallel to that to say like, okay, yeah, you do need to do the credential stuff. You need to check some boxes.

But what are you doing along the way that gets you at answering your actual purpose, your actual call in community? And to me, if we could have more young people who I know, at least from the ones that we pull and all the national data we look at. for 18 to 22 year olds, they're ready. They're ready for change. They want an opportunity to lead. They don't want to wait for our generations to get out of the way because we screwed everything up. So, they're ready to lead. And so, my...

challenge both for our generations to get out of the way and for them to step up to like, don't wait for me to say, this is what I think you should do. Or don't ask my permission, go out and do it challenge, you know, make these. The changes that this world needs to see. And, you know, here's my invitation for the 18 to 22-year-olds or the faculty who are working with those.

this is imperative that we get this right, that they are allowed to do this, that they are got the resources and access to the opportunity of mentors and the knowledges that they do. Because for me, Carmelita's life is on the line. My daughter, who is four years old, will be sitting in their classrooms, will be, you know, buying their products. They'll be benefiting from the solutions they make in STEM. That Carmelita in five generations?

We'll be benefiting from whatever they're coming up with right now, the solutions they're doing. There's nothing that we have that is so unique to us that we need to make sure it's preserved in these institutions. What we need is... folks who are empowered and emboldened to go out and find new solutions, new ways of living in the world that for me, as a very selfish father, and I don't even know what that is, great, great, great, great grandfather to a Carmelita.

that the young people that we have in our classrooms right now feel empowered to go out and track down those solutions, those challenges that they want to pursue to make this world better. And that we're doing everything we can to clear every hurdle, to make sure that they have access to the labs, to the resources, to knowledges that they need in order to pursue those questions. Thank you for all of that.

Thank you so much for your time and your insights today. We're going to wrap up unless you have any last words. No, thank you for having me. This is fantastic. To our listeners, we wish you the best on your journey in pursuing the life well lived.

Until next time. Listening to Patrick Reyes, especially towards the end there, I was thinking, you know, he speaks. with the passion of a prophet. And it's not just about the, you know, the, the feeling it's also. the element of indictment and urgency. We need to change. The time is now.

But then, you know, also this encouraging idea of, and if we would break open how we think about these things and talk about them, it's really exciting. And we have the resources for sort of moving forward and changing the world. Yeah, part of that breaking open, I think, that he was developing at different points in the conversation was this idea of rewriting the canon. reimagining the canon and extending the language that we're using to talk about all of these.

I mean, you know, sort of pushing forward the idea of what is a cultural commute? What does that look like? What is BIPOC futurism and how does that help us understand vocation in different ways? How does tapping into the stories of our ancestors help us and shape us and mentor us in ways that we just have not? been talking enough about. And I think Patrick's book and this conversation emphasized this extension of language in new and interesting ways.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, early on he... He used this phrase, and I never actually heard this word applied to the phenomenon he was describing, but the extraction model, this idea of, like, we're going to sort of find the best and the brightest, and then sort of... reformulate them uh scholarships you know just this is a whole there's a whole history of this over the last few decades in higher ed um and then he also talked about the problems of

You know, she sort of said, if it's not a word, it should be a word. Decommunification. Yeah. Or decontextualization. Right. And. I mean, I've mulled on this. I can see the ways in which early on in my mentoring, I was guilty of really... kind of decontextualizing many of my students so you know if we start talking about what are you going to do after you graduate and if they had sort of expressed interest in graduate school and

I, early on, I think I understood my role as opening up the horizons, right? Encouraging students, well, you can go anywhere, you can do anything. And so if a student said to me, I can't leave Chicago. My community's there. So if I'm going to go to school, it's going to have to be in Chicago. And I made... you know, the really painful mistake I can now see of thinking, no, it's to encourage them to, you know, go anywhere and you need to break those kind of ties. And that was really denying.

that for many of my students their community is a huge part of who they are why they're in school how they see their life i mean just you know this is their calling and vocation um so i'm just appreciate having some language to really diagnose that because I fear we do that often as mentors. Yeah, the importance of the way in which a community can mentor. the way in which our communities are sort of beacons and give us the image of that constellation that he was talking about earlier.

And I just loved when he said, you know, what we're doing at the university is teaching us to love our community. It's really giving us new ways to understand what we're even doing at the university and how to love, which is not language that we are used to using, but it may be. very necessary and, you know, sort of urgent at this particular juncture. And that doing that... requires courage, right? And his advice for young adults was just flat out be courageous.

You know, and that's language that we often use. We go back to the tradition of the virtues. And of course, courage is one of the important traditional virtues. But when you think about courage, connected to all these things that Patrick Reyes is talking about, it just takes on a whole new element of what are your... Where do you get that courage, right? You get it from the teachings of your grandmother. You get it in this, to me, to my ears, it's sort of moral obligation of what you...

Oh, your ancestors and also future generations, right? It's got some teeth to it. You don't just get to do whatever you want. And, you know, but underneath that requires courage. Yeah.

Five generations. Super inspiring. Listeners to this episode. may enjoy Season 1, Episode 4, Charisma and Craft, A Conversation with Ibu Patel, and Episode 6, Dangerous Ideas, in which we interview Rachel Mikva about self-critical faith. Callings is hosted by NetView, the network for vocation in undergraduate education, an association of over 250 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. NetView is administered by the Council of Independent Colleges.

and is funded through member dues and generous support from Lilly Endowment, Inc. Your hosts were Hannah Schell and Aaron Van Lanningham, and the episode was mixed by Caleb Kennedy. You can find our library of podcasts at netview.buzzsprout.com. Additional resources can be found at Netview's blog, vocationmatters.org. and at the NetView program page at the Council of Independent Colleges website, www.cic.edu. Our music was composed by Dan Kennedy. Thank you for listening.