Today I took a half-day for prayer, reflection, and Bible study, reflecting on how my life is going and how things should change. Along with many more personal reflections I developed a list of questions, which are below. I welcome anyone’s input. (Your answer to #1 might be more of a guess, unless you’ve known me in years past. After #1 they got a little more general.)

  1. Have I always needed nine hours of sleep? Or is that new? It’s not hard to believe that I was previously chronically sleep-deprived.
  2. How does one balance the need for personal time with the need to spend time with the spouse and children?
  3. How can learners be made (to speak frankly) to accept responsibility for their language learning?
  4. How can I embrace a vocation of suffering when—so far—increased stress levels have harmed family life? How do I protect my family without that being an open-ended license for laziness and self-indulgence?
  5. How can I satisfy my intellectual (and moral? and spiritual?) need to articulate the rottenness of a given situation, without discouraging others and prompting despondence in myself?
  6. How do I hold forth a positive vision for language learning without snuffing out smoldering reeds and/or ignoring the more significant pastoral issues involved?
  7. How do organizations work? How can there ever be congruence between the kind of person the leader is and the kind of person the people need for a leader?
  8. How does a person in a position of strength relate genuinely without overpowering a person in a position of weakness?
  9. What kind of leadership profits strong-minded and self-motivated people?
  10. How should a strong-minded person relate to an organization? With no loyalty, cooperating incidentally on shared aims as a matter of convenience? Or with an intensity of commitment to molding the organization that will (almost inevitably) beget conflict? Or is there a middle ground?