Superintendent’s Chat

Richard McClements, Shonto Preparatory School

A famous Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, wrote a short story in the 1880’s entitled, The Death of Ivan Ilych. This story describes the life of a man who loathed everything in his existence. He disliked his train ride to work, he hated his job, he had few friends, and he detested his wife. Life passed him by and then he was lying on his deathbed - his wife was holding his hand. Just before he took his last breath, he looked up at her and said, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”

The powerful message that Tolstoy was sending is that if you spend your life doing things that make you miserable, life will pass you by, and you will look back upon it with emptiness. There is no second chance at life. We cannot undo what we have already done. We can choose to be happy and give to this world, or we can choose to be miserable and take from this world.

Dr. Wayne Dyer is a noted motivational speaker. On a recent TV broadcast, Dr. Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Now if that character, Ivan Ilych, had looked at life as generally being wonderful, he would have been much happier and would not have felt that his whole life had been wrong.

Several months ago I wrote the following:

Choices, the one thing that life doesn't give us is the

opportunity to go back and undo what we have done.

That's why at the moment of decision, we need to make

those choices we'll never regret.

We are ultimately responsible for our lives and what we make of them. Your mother is not responsible. Your father is not responsible. One’s spouse is not responsible. Each of us is. A student’s years in school is a precious time when the clock is ticking, and he or she only has so much time to learn both the academics and the social skills needed to make it in the adult world. Dr. Dyer also said the following:

Life is not about being better than someone else. It is about

being better than you use to be.

Now that is a worthy goal. Everyone can work at being better than we use to be – whether it is as a son, daughter, husband, wife, friend, student, athlete, or teacher. We can choose to make the best of our life on this earth.