The other day my personal trainer said to me "remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint," and that struck a chord with me because I was already exhausted after only a few exercises and repetitions. Later I was reading a leadership article in the Harvard Business Review and out popped the same quote. Pace yourself. Take the long view. There must be something to it. And that got me to thinking about what I've been thinking about for 65 years, and how my currents of thought and reflection do come together in interesting ways over time.

At Oberlin I took a series of political theory courses that started with Hobbes and ended with Marx. At roughly the same time I enrolled in a series on modern religious thought, which often intersected with political theory, and covered everyone from St. Augustine to Alfred North Whitehead. I kept a beautiful little notebook with mindfully crafted script, enjoying being a student of life and culture and, well, nothing remotely practical. 

That is, until today. I recently finished two books: Fareed Zakaria's Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present and Alexandra Hudson's The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. It took something of a self-nudge to start reading each of these, but as I flipped through the pages I started to realize that many of the random themes that I'd previously drawn from ancient history took new life and had relevance for my work in leadership today. They were, in fact, there all along. Networking is tied to civility. Today's political turmoil is, in some ways, nothing new. 

What goes around, comes around. There's a comfort in knowing that the broad currents of history and philosophy run through all that we do, and that humanity, for all of the crises we see in today's 24/7 news cycle, is learning some things. Study of the liberal arts is valuable, and it enriches our understanding of others, helping us as we consider a life, for example, of public service. Arbitrary facts and moments of history take on new life. In both of the above-mentioned books, for example, the Netherlands steps forth. Hudson draws wisdom from Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Zakaria traces modern market messiness and democracy to the Dutch. 

In some ways, as we age we know less and less. Wisdom means acknowledging that we're Zen beginners, with sparks of knowledge that ultimately lead to greater unknowns. At the same time, I'm grateful for those unexpected, fleeting moments in life when things kind of come together. Patterns that we observed, material that we studied earlier in life come back into consciousness, and there are connections where we least expect.