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David Brooks returned to the University of Chicago (where he’d earned his BA) to become a Senior Fellow at LSI for many reasons. One was a desire to ask some of the best and brightest leaders of his generation a series of questions that he feels our longer lifespans beg.
“It struck me that we’re in this moment when we’re really inventing a new stage of life, which starts at age 60, 65, 70, when you may be stepping back from your main career. But because of improvements in health, you’ve still got a good 20, 25 years of energetic life ahead. So it’s worth asking: what am I gonna do with this time? How am I going to serve society at this time?”
To help LSI Fellows answer these questions, he posed a few dozen more, many inspired—in the University of Chicago ethos—by the Great Books. David’s undergraduate experience instilled a deep belief that “if you read these books seriously, you’ll know how to live, or at least become a little better at knowing how to live. The LSI comes from those common roots in the Graham School, so for the Fellows within the program, this was a chance not only to think about their lives and their future lives, but to think about it in a very specific context.”
In his course, called Answering the Big Questions, he offered that context with a syllabus of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, including Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl, James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner, and works by Alice Walker, William James, Albert Schweitzer, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.
“Those texts serve as the background for the kinds of conversations we had,” David says of the dialog among Fellows, “and that just seemed like the way to live more meaningfully.”
For Dr. Mohan Gundeti, a member of the inaugural LSI cohort, surgeon, and professor of pediatric urology at the University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences, this aspect of the Fellowship was life-changing. “I would not have read these books otherwise,” says Mohan. “I would have missed something in life if I hadn’t done it.” With all of his intense medical training and experience—including authoring medical texts, working as a mentor and educator, training surgeons and healthcare leaders, and achieving global influence in his field—he had not had an opportunity to delve into the humanities study, particularly the Great Books.
“Growing up in India, I read the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. But then reading about Buddhism, Daoisim, Aristotle, and Socrates and going back and re-reading the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and discussing it was so much intense learning.” Mohan says. He joined LSI to develop global surgical services to mitigate kidney failure in children, especially for children in the developing world. Reading Victor Frankl and Fredrick Buechner, among others, helped to put his own sense of purpose into a larger humanistic and spiritual context.
He cites Viktor Frankl’s book, which describes life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival, as being particularly meaningful. “I could not get up while I was reading the book. So much endurance, so much resilience, against all odds and in the midst of so much suffering, not losing sight of what you’re supposed to do. It tells us that once we have this focus, once we have this bigger purpose, there is nothing we can’t endure.”
The Transcendent “Why”
David echoes Mohan’s takeaway from Frankl and cites Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts that “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
This is one reason David feels that an ongoing exercise of humanistic inquiry matters so much. “If you have a purpose, then when the setbacks come, you’ll be able to handle them, because you know what you’re here for.” He points out that the hard sciences answer a lot of important questions, “but they don’t specialize in the why questions. What’s the ultimate purpose and goal here?”
For people entering a new chapter in life, this is perhaps the most important question to answer.
“We have all these people who are likely to be active into their 80s,” David says. “That’s just a tremendous untapped societal resource. Some of the Fellows here are working on food insecurity, some are working on gun violence. There’s a whole range of issues they’re tackling.”
But it’s not about ego or heroism; it’s about service. One of the Big Questions that David asks in his course is what it means to be a servant. “Most of [the Fellows] say they want to be the support for other people. That’s just a tremendously valuable role. They have management experience and they know how to run organizations… It’s a wisdom that I think a lot of organizations will benefit from. As a result, I think we have a real shot at solving some of those intractable problems.”
The Meaning of Wisdom
David suggests among the most valuable aspects of taking a course like his later in life is that “you’re old enough to understand what you’re reading in the way you just aren’t when you’re younger. You bring to it not only knowledge, but wisdom.” And what, exactly, is that? This is another of the Big Questions David poses in his course. Here he quotes Michel de Montaigne, “We can be knowledgeable with another man’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with another man’s wisdom.”
“He’s drawing the distinction between being knowledgeable and being wise. Knowledge is just a collection of facts,” David says. “Wisdom is sometimes held in the body as a result of your experiences. And wisdom is in part an intellectual quality, which is the ability to know how the flow of events will happen. It’s an intuitive awareness of how things will turn out. But it’s also an emotional capacity.”
The Essentials of Empathy, Humility, and Connection
“We wouldn’t say a self-centered person is wise; wisdom is partly the ability to understand what other people are going through,” David notes. “I don’t think you can have it unless your mind is fully engaged and encountering the best that’s been thought and said. The people who wrote these books sometimes know us better than we know ourselves…they are just knowledgeable about humanity. To be able to spend your time in their company through the page is just a very valuable conversation to be part of.”
But it’s the conversations in real life—especially if they involve debate—that ultimately lead LSI fellows to discover the answers they seek.
Pamela Narins, a former EVP of strategic planning and also a University of Chicago alum, appreciates the connections she made in the fellowship on many levels. “The LSI year confirmed for me that I want to create and find roles where I can help reestablish the bonds of community and the regard for productive disagreement,” she says. “This past year taught me that while our current state of polarization may feel new, people have been trying to figure out how to get along since the beginning of time. Across the whole of the human experiment, we’ve been grappling with this. Each class I took provided additional proof: from classical writings, to poetry, to neuro-science even, to psychology, photojournalism, sociology and more. The theme came up again and again. I found both comfort and guidance in that, and a resolve to pursue my version of a solution.”
This aspect of the LSI fellowship experience played off a strength she leveraged and built throughout her career. “Maybe I’ve always been an empath, but I certainly had my fair share of practice in understanding the motivations of others. While it was nowhere in any job description I ever had, my professional life was successful in no small part because of my ability to ensure that all within my purview felt heard, and that ideas were captured and communicated.”
The themes of compassion and connection, of learning and growth through continual dialogue, run deep in the LSI Fellowship ethos. It may be that the LSI cohort is one that does, in fact, self-select for empathy.
“The thing I’ve enjoyed most about LSI is the level of warmth in the room when you walk in to teach,” David says fondly. “I don’t know if [Fellows] were selected for good naturedness, but they really are just a warm and glowing group who are in love with each other. And that warmth has its own unique factor in the classroom that, frankly, I didn’t experience as an undergrad here.” He notes a remarkable alchemy when big questions are posed to such an accomplished group of leaders with a shared mission: to put their talents to use for the benefit of society.
The Most Powerful Answer: Fellowship Itself
“To me, the pulsing heart of LSI is frankly not what we the faculty are doing,” David says, “It’s what the Fellows are doing with each other, and it’s the friendships they form that is really the core of the program.”
The importance of connection and relationships flowed from the material he presented through the discussions among Fellows. “We read a great novel by Wallace Stegner called Crossing the Safety, which is about lifelong friendship.” David explains, “To read a book about friendship in older age, at a time when these people have just made so many new friends…I think that helped inform the guts of the program.”
As David points out, the personal insights and deeper self-knowledge gained through the LSI Fellowship do not occur in isolation. It’s not only a matter of reading the books; it’s about allowing conversations to spark new thinking and perspectives.
“If you’re considering LSI and you’re maybe stepping back from your main career, you might be under the illusion that you can handle this transition alone,” he says. “These are hard challenges and nobody should have to do these alone. So if you do it with a lot of people going through the same process, it’s just super helpful…And the idea of making 25 new best friends is just a very delightful prospect.”
Pamela agrees. “One of the immense gifts of the Fellowship year was the formation of a new community,” she says. “The lasting relationships we have formed are proof of concept for the path I am choosing to follow: if lasting community can arise so quickly, simply from spending time and space in a shared pursuit, it shows that repair is possible, and the idea I have for my future path has value.”
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This piece was developed in partnership with ROAR Forward. Learn more about ROAR Forward here.
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