I wake to heavy blue-gray light sifting through the blinds.  The rain is hard and hits the metal roof in rhythmic waves.  The bed is warm and I do not want to leave it just yet.  

But I will.  I will ease from under the covers and feel the cool wood of the floor on the bottoms of my feet.  I will stretch and remember again, as I do every morning, that my body is not as limber as it used to be.  I will open the blinds and see a small marble of hot pink breaking through the clouds at the horizon.

And, then, the executive function of my brain will remind me of all I have to do.  It is a long list.

Fifty years ago I was a college student in the second semester of my freshman year. Among other courses, including the second half of both American History and American Literature, I was enrolled in Psychology 101. 

I registered for the class with enthusiasm.  Psychology was a real “college” class.  I had never taken it before and in the 1970s, on the heels of the revolutionary 1960s, psychology still felt a little risky.  My enthusiasm, however, waned rather quickly.

My recollection is that it was a Wednesday night, the night before our second exam of the semester.  It was late and the hallways of the dorm were quiet.  Yellow light seeped from under a few doors, but almost everyone was in bed when the fire alarm went off.

We moved in small pods toward the various exits and then stood in our pajamas and bare feet in the cold and dark for what seemed an interminable length of time while the Macon Fire Department confirmed that there was no fire, no danger at all and allowed us to return to our beds.

The next morning, someone came up with the idea of asking Professor Lewis if she would consider rescheduling the exam in light of the previous night’s events.  Her response, delivered in a haughty drawl, was “I would really like to see how you perform under these circumstances.” 

I was 18.  I was unaccustomed to adults being anything but helpful and sympathetic.  I took the exam, of course, and finished the semester doing everything necessary to make an A, but my interest in psychology disappeared.

It was later in the semester that I arrived in class to find a quote written on the chalkboard at the front of the room, a leftover from an earlier class.  In the few seconds it took to read it and the few more it took to write it down in what would become the first of many quote books I have kept over the years, I gave myself a mantra to which I would return often and which would provide the motivation necessary to create a productive and useful life.

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.”  – T.H. Huxley

I have quoted it to myself and to others hundreds of times in the last 50 years.  It reminds me that an education imposes a responsibility.  It reminds me that self-discipline is not a matter of desire.  And on this stormy morning, the words of a man who was never able to find an academic position and, thus, was never called Professor, turn me from the window to the things that ought to be done.