We have all heard paraphrases of the quotation, attributed to the Greek mathematician Archimedes, about the power of levers to move the world. As a history teacher, I have heard this idea quoted many times with slight variations, but usually the point is the same: “With the right lever, one can move the earth.”
However, the actual quotation attributed to Archimedes comes to us in the writings of another Greek mathematician, Pappus of Alexandria, and this attribution is different and more substantial than any modern formulations. The specific wording from this ancient source offers a crucial corrective to the watered-down forms of the phrase found in modern speech. According to Pappus, Archimedes actually said, “d µ p? st? ?a? t s?,” which, translated, reads: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.” The lesson is clear: it is not a lever alone that moves the earth, but rather a lever utilized by one who has first found a solid place to stand. We cannot leverage any idea or initiative in our lives or in our work without first finding a solid stage of conviction on which to commit ourselves to movement and change.
For me, changes in my life that were for years seemingly impossible came about once I began to allow the power of my school community and my vocation as an educator to serve as the solid ground and spiritual fuel for my personal levers of character and devotion to family, life, and health.
May 14, 2008, was both a terrible day and a great day. I had just arrived at my doctor’s office for my four-month check up. I went every four months because I was on medication for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and cardiac inflammation. I had been experiencing some issues with sleep apnea as well. All of this was self-inflicted. I was very overweight and out of shape. To be exact, that day I weighed in at 368 pounds. Slowly deteriorating health had plagued my professional life as a lawyer before I switched my career field in the past few years to education. One of the many reasons I entered education was the experience that my legal career rewarded an immoderate work ethic and prioritized professional productivity at the price of personal and familial commitments. I was paid to produce externally not thrive internally. The practice of law is not without philosophical and spiritual content and impact, on both the lawyer and the society. But in my experience of the bar, I fell into the Darwinian dance of competing for selection and material reward.
My new life in an independent school planted me in a richer and healthier landscape. I had a family that I was getting to know better with the increased time I could allot to my private life. I had teaching and coaching colleagues who also shared the priorities of family, student relationships, and professional and personal growth. And, most inspiring of all, I had students depending on me as their mentor and leader. This constellation of souls formed a moral magnet for me. For the first time in my professional life, my profession itself was calling me to personal health and offering me a community of concern to fuel the effort. I came to see that I had been neglecting the most important things in any life: my character and my health.
My poor health situation did not happen overnight. It was much more gradual and insidious. With every passing year, fast food and lack of exercise became the acceptable norm for me. I kept telling myself that I would worry about it later or get to it at a more convenient time in my life. To put it mildly, I was a ticking time bomb. My doctor called me out. My cardiac inflammation was at a point where a cardiac event (heart attack) was imminent. He looked at me and said, “Steve, I just don’t know what else I can tell you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, but it is all in your hands. I cannot do anything else.”
When I left the office I was as down as I’ve felt in a long time. How could this be happening? I thought that my life was ending. My family needed me, and I wasn’t going to be there. My new professional life as a teacher, coach, mentor, and administrator at a wonderful independent school was now fading away from me. Words cannot describe what I was feeling. I was not ready to go home, so I went to a local marina, and just sat in my car for a couple of hours alone with my thoughts. I just kept thinking about my family, my friends, and my school community. I told myself, “Come on. You are a smart guy. You can figure this thing out. What do you need to do?” Then a childhood memory popped into my head.
When I was in the seventh grade, I came home after my first week of football practice completely bruised and crying. This was my first year of playing football, and I was sore and feeling sorry for myself. I had had enough. When my dad came home, I thought I was going to get a sympathetic pep talk, and maybe he’d tell me I could quit. However, he had something else in store for me. To my surprise, it was one of those dreaded character-building experiences. He told me to go outside and move our large woodpile two feet to the right. I asked why I was being punished, and he simply said, “This is not a punishment — it’s a lesson. After you finish the job, if you want to quit football, then you have my blessing.” When I explained that I couldn’t lift the pile he responded by saying “You mean to tell me you can’t lift a single piece of wood?” I said of course “I can.” He said, “Then that’s how you will do it. Don’t look at the pile. Just move it one piece at a time. Son, God doesn’t give any of us more than we can handle. Remember that as you think about making your decision.”
He was right. After what seemed like hours I moved the pile just as he had said. And needless to say, I didn’t quit the football team. Once I remembered that story, a light bulb went on. It truly was a life-changing moment. I thought to myself that if all of my health problems were self inflicted, then all I had to do was stop doing them. If it was in my control, then start controlling it. I had been acting like I had an incurable disease, but that was me being selfish and depressed. I needed to change the flaw in my character that led me to lower expectations for my own choices. Of course, I had had passing thoughts like this in prior decades of my life. We have all had moments when the path toward higher expectations for health or maturity seems clear, and yet we fail at execution. What was different now was that I had joined a learning community with moral and spiritual purpose. In strong learning communities, we admit our need for others. And we annually, and even daily, offer ourselves to one another to meet the needs they share with us. We are not alone. Our gifts are stretched when they are given to the community for sharing with others and flow back to us with the increased strength that comes from loving our neighbors as ourselves.
My plan was very simple. I would be a little healthier each day. I would be committed to not just losing weight, but also to getting healthy. And I would lean on friends in the school community for support in a way that I would have never dared in a law firm. I shared with a few cherished colleagues my goals and started exercising with friends from school. The amount of weight lost was really not the focus. In fact, I pledged to not even weigh myself until my next doctor visit. My goal was to be healthy. It had taken me a long time to get in the condition I was in, so it was going to take a long time to get out. I had also crawled into that sorry state alone. I knew the way out could not be an equally solo mission. It was clear: the way out was to reach out. I needed to practice personally what healthy schools do metabolically: establish and encourage moral purpose, create room and time for strengthening relationships, feed and share spiritual imagination, and commit to community expectations. This is a lesson that any good teacher or administrator gives to struggling students or teachers. The script I knew became the syllabus I needed.
I walked every day for the first week, about two miles a day. Then the next few weeks, it was every day for three miles, until after a month I was walking twice a day for three miles on each walk. I went in for my four-month check up and my doctor was ecstatic. He ran into the room and yelled, “Congratulations!” My cholesterol had dropped from 230 to 90, my blood pressure was down from 140/90 to 112/75, and the most important number — the cardiac test — had dropped from 7.78 to 1.13 (all in four months). And I now weighed 297 pounds, down 71 from the previous visit.
I was cautiously relieved, but far from done. My colleagues had always been supportive of my efforts and this community of concern only got tighter and more encouraging. So many souls in the school community — parents, teachers, and most of all the students — would say some of the most incredibly supportive things. I cannot tell you how much that meant to me. In reality it meant everything. The year went on, and I walked twice daily through the winter, committed to not slowing down or losing momentum. My goal was never about not being obese, but rather to get healthy and be in the best shape I could be as a person, a husband, a father, and a teacher and mentor to young people.
The following September, I came off all medication entirely, and I now am maintaining a consistent, comfortable weight. I have lost 150 pounds, but I am nowhere near done. While a lawyer and financial businessperson working in private practice, I envisioned, but could never make, these changes. I needed friends in a community, people I saw every hour of every day, who also loved life, health, and learning. I needed a community that was driven by a mission for meaning beyond mere profit motives. It was love of and from my family that was a strong motivation, but all those people and forces were present in my life for years, yet I was not able to change. What changed was the environment that came with a vocation in teaching and the life-affirming metabolism of a healthy school. These patterns were new to me and they set a new stage. I offered my personal story in our weekly chapel so as to share both inspiration and gratitude to the school community whose love and passion empowered my transformation.
We do not educate to maintain the world as it is, but to expand the beauty of the world and the social justice of the human spirit. Therefore, the skill more important than many others is the ability to dream, dare, and accomplish change. As a Jewish man in an Episcopal school, I am testament to the truth that when schools of any stripe articulate their missions with confident clarity and inclusive invitation, people of all faiths and philosophies can share and spread the substance of the school mission. A school constantly focusing on its internal moral and spiritual patterns and potential signals and supports all members of its community to take up their own journey toward lives of authentic and compassionate pattern and purpose. When schools work openly and passionately on living up to their missions, they set a solid stage for children and adults to lean more confidently and with more company into the levers of their unique gifts.
Schools that dream, change, and grow inspire their community members of all ages to dream, change, and grow. We need each other. My school’s solid soul helped me to make major changes in my health and life. And this personal transformation has inspired me to give back to the school more than ever and add my mission-inspired life as a stronger brick in the base of the school’s sacred ground. My message to my students is that they can stand on my colleagues and me as they dare to move the earth.