“I.T.G.S.O.T.I.N.B.D.” I learned this initialism from a co-instructor during my first trip in the Sawatch: “In the grand scheme of things, it’s no big deal.” It’s become a mantra of sorts through my ten years of salaried employment at the High Mountain Institute. Useful while desperately cleaning the fuel line and shaker jet of a faulty stove or searching for the teenagers who’ve wandered five canyon miles in the wrong direction. I chant it under my breath like a psalm or snippet of vedic wisdom as the copy machine surrenders to entropy, doing so–inevitably, excruciatingly–as I attempt to print syllabi on the first day of the semester.
Whenever I find myself flailing and faffing about in the proverbial weeds, I remember those three vowels and seven consonants. If the situation feels especially dire, I ask a further set of questions: are the students physically and emotionally intact, more or less? Does x, y, or z experience, albeit exasperating and/or painful, contain within it some learning potential? Will we be able to laugh about this sometime within the next moon cycle? Whatever’s overcooking our collective grits at any given moment tends not to matter so much in two weeks’ time–or even within the space of twenty-four hours. The storm blows over and the sun comes out.
The canyons, in particular, are venerable teachers of perspective. Traveling through southern Utah three or four times per year has taught me about the relative smallness of my own immediate concerns. I’ve seen petroglyphs in Cedar Mesa centuries older than the oldest European relic in North America, 150 million-year-old Navajo sandstone striated through an east-facing monocline of Comb Ridge, the stars of the Milky Way stretched out over Bears Ears. Each is a visual reminder that, however enduring we suppose our work at HMI to be in the scale of individual human lives, we’re ultimately just a blip in the cultural and geological history of the region; we’re a nearly imperceptible aberration of matter, a buried fraction of a line item inside the cosmic accounting.
A useful bit of nihilism, to be sure. But nihilism alone does not a tenured teacher make. The other species of wisdom I’ve gleaned from twenty semesters comes from an abiding spiritual allegiance to the humanities–a set of disciplines defined by their faith in human agency, authority, and interpretation. Words matter, the poet insists; the world would look otherwise, says the historian, were it not for the efforts and actions of ordinary humans. Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens that “there are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” Our future depends entirely on the stories we tell about the present and have told about the past. And maybe HMI is just that: a story made and maintained in the collective imagination of several thousand students and a few dozen adults over the course of a few decades, many of whom have chosen to love the school and call it home.
“You make the thing,” writes the poet Tom Lux, “because you love the thing / and you love the thing because someone else loved it / enough to make you love it.” It’s no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve learned that a love like that–whatever it means and however it manifests in small and ordinary ways–matters in the world.
Jacob’s Time at HMI By the Numbers:
- 21 Semesters; 2 Summer Terms; 1 Educator’s Expedition
- 51 wilderness expeditions
- 586 days spent leading backcountry trips with HMI
- 127 college recommendations written
- 14 times reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
- 648 students taught in History and English
- 7 grease trap cleaning experiences
- 184 FOD (Faculty On Duty) days
This article originally appeared in the 2024 Fall Newsletter/Impact Report