鈥淕ood morning,鈥� said the little prince.
鈥淕ood morning,鈥� said the merchant.
Thus opens a scene from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exup茅ry, which first returned to my mind a year ago as I tried to show my students that something essential is lost when we outsource our thinking鈥攅ven to something as efficient as AI.
In the book, the merchant is selling pills designed to quench thirst. People who take one per week are freed from the need to drink water. The little prince, with his simplicity of heart, is able to reveal the absurdity of such attempts at efficiency:
鈥淲hy are you selling those?鈥� the little prince asked.
鈥淏ecause they save a tremendous amount of time,鈥� the merchant replied. 鈥淓xperts have done the calculations. You save fifty-three minutes every week.鈥�
鈥淎nd what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?鈥�
鈥淎nything you like鈥︹��
The little prince fell silent.
鈥淎s for me,鈥� he said at last, 鈥渋f I had fifty-three minutes, I would walk鈥攕lowly鈥攖oward a spring of fresh water.鈥�
This year, for the second time, I taught a course that, in a way, felt like a leisurely stroll toward a fountain. It鈥檚 called Spiritual Exercises and is part of the major in Transformative Education, though many students arrive out of curiosity. What we seek in this class is something that is both very precise and of the utmost urgency today: whatever keeps our deepest questions alive鈥攖he thirst for meaning that refuses to go away. In this course, the goal matters less than the path. And to walk, we begin by clearing space.
For an hour and forty-five minutes, twice a week, we set technology aside. If attention wandered, it wandered inward鈥攊nto memory, into restlessness, into thought. We returned, deliberately, to writing by hand. I distributed small notebooks鈥攂right, almost childlike鈥攖hat became our companions. The 鈥渘otebook rule鈥� was simple: what is written there belongs to you and can be brought to any test, any conversation鈥攅ven the mid-term oral exam. And slowly, something happened: memory became dense, words took root, and the classroom became more human.
The course unfolded in four movements.
The first, The World We Live In, asks us to look without flinching at our contemporary lives. We live in a world of loneliness masked by noise, where we can feel alone even when surrounded by people. The quiet fatigue of relationships never quite begins, and the immersion in our phones consumes our days. We ask what holds us back from 鈥渟piritual exercises鈥濃�攃oncrete actions and activities that allow us to reflect on what is happening to us鈥攊n our questions and in our intuitions about possible answers.
We start by discussing 鈥淭his Is Water,鈥� a commencement address by David Foster Wallace, who invites us to resist the dull gravity of the 鈥渄efault setting,鈥� that inward collapse of attention that renders the world outside ourselves almost invisible.
Then we encounter the famous psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who, in his book The Anxious Generation, highlights the effects of excessive technology use, including spiritual degradation. Though he calls himself an atheist, he declares that, in order to describe human beings, he cannot help but use religious language (maybe because we are religious beings?). He says it plainly: we carry within us a God-shaped hole that we try to fill with whatever we can but it does not hold. The students recognize this immediately; there is no need to persuade them. They know the pull of the phone, the quiet compulsion, the way attention fractures, and the neglect of their own hearts. And yet, they also speak鈥攕ometimes hesitantly鈥攐f another possibility: of gestures, however small, that seem to gather the self back together.
Even our viewing of 鈥淣osedive,鈥� an episode of the cynical British TV series Black Mirror, becomes a kind of parable in our classroom. The episode depicts how, in a world governed entirely by ratings, where every gesture is calculated, it is the flawed, unguarded figures who appear most alive鈥攎ore fragile, perhaps, but also more real.
In the second movement, Witnesses of Spiritual Exercises, we encounter men and women who, even in dire circumstances, have never given up on practicing 鈥渟piritual exercises.鈥� A visiting scholar introduced us to Etty Hillesum (1914鈥�1943), a young Dutch Jewish woman who wrote letters and diaries from the Westerbork Transit Camp, where she and thousands of other Dutch Jews awaited their transport to Auschwitz. Surrounded by destruction, she remained attentive to beauty, to music, to the presence of others and the need to care for them, and to God. Her life is a journey, from being a 鈥渒neeler in training鈥� to someone who cannot live without God.
A similar journey can be found in Dorothy Day鈥檚 (1897鈥�1980) long loneliness that slowly becomes a longing; in the burning colors and restless letters of Vincent van Gogh (1853鈥�1890); in the quiet, sustained attention of Patrick Bringley, who, after a great personal loss, chooses to quit his job at a prestigious magazine and stand still鈥攂y working for ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art鈥攗ntil beauty begins, slowly, to speak again, as he tells in his memoir All the Beauty in the World.
The 鈥渘otebook rule鈥� was simple: what is written there belongs to you and can be brought to any test, any conversation鈥攅ven the mid-term oral exam. And slowly, something happened: memory became dense, words took root, and the classroom became more human.
听
At the McMullen Museum, guided by Carina, a PhD student in Formative Education, we practiced contemplation: not consuming, not passing through, but remaining in front of artworks. Miriam, a professional pianist and a mother of six, came to visit us and turned an ordinary Gasson classroom into a concert hall. She gave us Bach, Chopin, and Schubert, but also a personal testimony: for her, music is not a luxury, but a necessity of the soul.
Two Formative Education PhD students accompanied us in understanding the relevance of the body for 鈥渟piritual exercises.鈥� Paul spoke of his life with people with disabilities in a L鈥橝rche community, where vulnerability strips away illusion and reveals something essential. Harrison opened up a conversation on sports鈥攏ot as performance but as a space in which the body itself searches, strains, and reaches beyond itself.
The third movement鈥�Spiritual but Not Religious?鈥攃hallenges a nonsensical but oft-repeated self-descriptor of our age. Here we are accompanied by Augustine of Hippo and Ignatius of Loyola鈥攖wo restless seekers who discovered, each in his own way, that finding does not mean ceasing to search but rather intensifies the quest. To encounter God is not to arrive but to begin again. As Gregory of Nyssa writes, life unfolds 鈥渇rom beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end.鈥�
We ended our semester with a long-awaited Spiritual Exercises Workshop. Each student brought something of their own life鈥攁n experience, a fragment, a gesture that, somehow, represented for them an exercise of the spirit. They spoke of walking, silence, music, friendship, of moments in which the surface of things gave way, just enough, to reveal a depth.
And listening to them, you begin to recognize it again鈥攖hat quiet, insistent thirst. A thirst that does not disappear, that cannot be managed or replaced; the thirst that, if we allow it, sets us in motion鈥攕lowly, patiently鈥攖oward a fountain.
Emanuele Colombo is professor of formative education in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and a research scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.
.webp)
