Last week I participated in a meeting of Dominican’s administrators. An invited speaker, Sr. Ann Willits, O.P. gave a talk in which she introduced the metaphor of the “running broad jump” (contrasted with a standing broad jump). I got nervous thinking I might soon be asked to get up and do some actual exercise, but happily it was indeed a metaphor.

The point she was making was that, as university leaders, we need to be in touch with and informed by our Dominican Catholic tradition as we try to move our university forward and so, like preparing to do a running broad jump, we have to take some steps back into that tradition before running forward and leaping ahead. It was a great message and the more I think about it in relation to our students, the more I want to say things like this:

As a university student, you need to honor your past and the past of others, to learn from it and bring it with you into your future. Preparing for this sort of “running broad jump,” you need to take a few steps back and gather yourself appropriately. I think that entails both an intentionality of purpose and an openness to being surprised.

The running start for the running broad jump means first going back into our contexts and traditions -- cultural, religious, ethnic, familial, national, etc. -- in a selective retrieval that helps us find the most meaningful and significant aspects of the past to carry forward with us into the creative and responsible future we hope to realize. What from the past best speaks to today’s questions and concerns? What deserves to be carried forward into the future? Sometimes we know what we’re looking for back there, because we have a good grasp and a sharp reading of the needs and challenges of the present, along with a strong sense of what from the past might most help us now. So we sift and search for our best usable past, with a definite intentionality of purpose.

Beyond that, however, hopefully we’ve rendered ourselves teachable, and open to what we’re not looking for already, so that we can on occasion be surprised radically by what we find back there, what in fact serendipitously “finds us,” and helps us see our present and ourselves in unexpected but unmistakably vivid and valid ways. Perhaps each time we venture back there, after one running broad jump is done and we’re preparing for the next, we will discover new things we never realized were awaiting -- perhaps because we weren’t quite ready to find them. So rendering ourselves teachable and open is one of the conditions for the possibility of these serendipitously luminescent insights.

I like to think this running start of a running broad jump is one we have to keep initiating again and again, after every jump has landed, always going back anew and retrieving somewhat different things, even things we’d passed over deliberately during previous visits, and then using them wisely in order to read and respond to the signs of our always changing times.

Maybe that’s one helpful metaphor for university education: the running broad jump, in which we keep moving forward into a creative and responsible future, precisely by becoming freshly informed and empowered by our purposeful and serendipitous engagement with the past.