September 2015 Leadership Reflection

Leadership Reflection for September 2015:

Developing Leadership Through Hobbies

          I like to encourage the students in the ACES James Scholar Honors Program to have hobbies and interests beyond the classroom and laboratory. Why? Not only because outside interests help us to expand our horizons, nurture our minds, and introduce us to new people – but also because hobbies can empower us to learn to exercise our leadership skills in the company of family members and friends who share our interests in the “real world” that lies just beyond the “Ivory Tower” in the Grove of Academe.

          One of my favorite hobbies is reading and writing poetry. In elementary school, I enjoyed reading and memorizing the poems that were assigned to me as memory work, but I didn’t start to write poetry in earnest until I was in college. I published some poems in literary journals during my graduate school days, and in recent years, I have written poems for various occasions that can be sung to public-domain tunes. Some of my recent poems have been sung before an audience and have been well-received.

          Poetry has been a gateway through which I have learned to express in verse what I have learned about life in general and leadership in particular. I have found that insights about leadership (and almost any other topic imaginable) are better internalized and remembered if they come packaged along with rhythm and rhyme. My versifying hobby has helped me to improve both my spoken and written communication skills and provided me with an added dose of self-confidence as I present information to various audiences. Moreover, throughout my professional career, poetry has expanded my horizons, provided fertile ground for nourishing my imagination, and introduced me to myths and legends from around the world about amazing people, places, and events, thus providing a doorway for me to discover the similarities and appreciate the differences among worldwide cultures.

          What is your hobby? Do you have outside interests beyond the four walls of your home and/or office? If not, I encourage you to seek out a hobby that will help you connect with new people, edutain your brain, and broaden your perspective on the human condition – all of which will enable you to enhance the leadership skills that you can use in the everyday world.

          In conclusion, I’d like to tell you about one of my favorite ancient poets, Hesiod. His life story reminds me of another leadership-related reward that hobbies can give us: They can help us to keep alive that childlike sense of wonder at the world around us, ensuring that we remain young at heart and eager to embrace new ideas and new people for as long as we live. J

The Greek Poet Hesiod: An Ancient Artist and Agriculturalist

·         Text by Rob Chappell, JSALT Advisor

·         Translations of Hesiod by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914) – Public Domain @ http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/index.htm

·         Photo from Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

          The practice of agriculture and the art of poetry are as old as human civilization itself, and many writers of the ancient Mediterranean countries composed works of poetry dealing with agricultural subjects. One of the earliest agricultural poets known to us is Hesiod, a Greek sage who flourished in the eighth century BCE. He is best remembered for two major poems that he composed: the Works and Days and the Theogony (Birth of the Gods).

          The Works and Days is an agricultural almanac in verse, addressed to Hesiod’s brother Perses, who managed their family farm. The poem goes through the cycle of the four seasons, explaining what kind of agricultural work needs to be done at any given time of year. Since Hesiod and his contemporaries lived long before the invention of atomic clocks and desktop calendars, the poet described how to keep track of time by watching the stars:

“When the Pleiades, Atlas' daughters, start to rise, begin your harvest; plough when they go down. For forty days and nights, they hide themselves, and as the year rolls round, appear again when you begin to sharpen sickle-blades; this law holds on the plains and by the sea, and in the mountain valleys, fertile lands far from the swelling sea.”

à Works and Days, Lines 383 ff.

In addition to agricultural advice and astronomical lore, the Works and Days also includes retellings of some famous Greek myths (e.g., “The Five Ages of Humankind” and “Pandora’s Box,”) along with witty proverbial sayings, which ensured its popularity among rural and urban audiences alike for centuries to come.

The original Greek text of the opening lines of Hesiod’s Works and Days appears on the left, while a Latin translation of the same is on the right. From an edition of Hesiod’s poems published at Basel, Switzerland, in 1539.

          The Theogony contains traditional stories about the beginning of the world and the origins of various members of the Greek pantheon in a brilliant synthesis of epic mythology and philosophical allegory. The poem opens with the tale of how Hesiod, while still a shepherd, became a poet:

“From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon. … Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice. … One day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon. … They plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.”

à Theogony, Selections from Lines 1-35

          Hesiod’s poems are wonderful food for thought, not only because they are highly edutaining, but also because they show that at an early stage in the development of Western civilization, the arts and the agricultural sciences were very closely linked together in the seamless web of everyday life. Hesiod, the master poet of his age, grew up on his family’s farm, worked as a shepherd, and earned national acclaim as a poet (although he probably didn’t quit his “day job” as a shepherd).

          Across a gulf of 27 centuries, Hesiod presents us with a timely challenge: to “think outside the box” of our individual academic disciplines to create a holistic worldview that satisfies both the mind and the heart.