I typically engage students in this model by asking them to draw their own Comfort/Chaos Circle. This is a great activity to get students to check with themselves and communicate where they are with me.

This quarter’s experiment has helped me see that every class we attend, every word we write, every article we read is where we are going. We are already there. ​ I do not want that experience to feel like some unrelenting ultra-marathon. I want it to feel alive and loving, nourishing and compelling. I want to feel hungry and then full and then hungry again. ​ May reading, like all things we do, become an invitation to experience the miracle that we are alive — still, and in the first place. And may we use the very act of reading itself to challenge the idea that life is about collecting the most knowledge or arriving at some finish line or final page. ​ I felt a greater sense of agency because I got to decide what to read each time I read. Choosing intuitively meant I looked forward to making a choice about what to read. ​ This quarter’s experiment has taught me that I must do both to become the scholar I want to be — a person who can hold uncertainty as well as she can hold knowledge, who can be slow and discerning, and insatiably curious and eager at the same time.

Fascination in the Kaplan’s sense is a magical (that’s my word) quality of an environment where your attention is held but not drained.

“I began to wonder… how might I organize my to do list so that it makes me feel the way I do when I look at my pantry? How might it become a place that gives me a sense possibility, where I want to create—to work. I’ve been playing with this idea for a couple months and have come to some preliminary conclusions.”