1 Jan 2025
My annual “wishing you” post is one that crosses between my professional and personal lives. (read previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022 or search wishing you and they will all come up 🙂 It’s a little odd to even think of different parts of our lives since they merge together and are difficult to separate. This is why, it seems, that we struggle to “balance” our lives and not bring work home with us or fall into the trap of working all the time.
It was the search of needing a different kind of balance that led to many changes this past year including the decision to change jobs and to move to new a location. When you upend your life, the moments of reflection—like the new year—prompt a deeper kind of retrospection. Not only do you consider how the decisions are currently working out, but it seems, for me, it also forced me to think about what I really wanted and needed to be happy in all aspects of my life. And when you’re hovering in a certain age range, it seems these conversations with yourself have more weight.
One of the things that I’ve always liked about being a professor and working in higher education is that I can read all sorts of things and call it work. # And speaking of reading, one thing we are taught how to read in graduate school is theory. These are the books and articles that are usually highly specialized and can be difficult to get through. Learning to read them and think about them is a learned practice.
A theorist that I have always appreciated is Michel Serres. He is not as well known (in the US) as some of his contemporaries (such as Foucault or Bachelard), but not only do I appreciate his eccentricities of thought, he helped me learn to read French. Many years ago, I promised my grandmere that I would learn Cajun French. Doing this away from home meant that my best option was to learn French and go from there. As I started to learn the language—the verb tenses, the sentence constructions, and growing my vocabulary—I began to see that some of the English translations of French thinkers didn’t seem fully complete to me. So that is why I have read a lot of the work of Serres in French.
In English, a preposition (e.g., to, from, of, at) starts a prepositional phrase, and it is a word used to show direction, time, place, location, spatial relationships, or to introduce an object.
But in French, the prepositional phrase has a little more importance because some verbs cannot be fully understood without a preposition. This could be why Serres had such an affinity for the preposition. In his view, the prepositional phrase as a pre-position. It sets up for what comes after or it sets up the true force of the sentence (the verb or action). Serres wants to really lean into prepositions: “what better name for those relations that precede any position?… It’s as though the wise grammarian who named them “prepositions” knew that they preceded any possible position.” & For Serres, the lowly preposition is key to language and understanding drawn from language because “language groups [ideas] through prepositions.” &&
We needed this background to fully understand the importance of my word choice for 2025 because this word is a preposition. For 2025, I wish you the strength to go toward.
Toward as preposition means
- Of motion In the direction of, on the way to
- Of position In the direction of;
but the word also needs to be parsed by its parts: to and ward. Simply put, “to” expresses motion in the direction of and “-ward” as a suffix is necessary to indicate what direction. Toward pre-positions a direction but does not actually encapsulate it. In other words, the direction is unknown, uncharted. It’s something you have to make it. By itself, toward is not active. It’s simply a concept that you have to enact. That the prepositional sets up a move so that the true positionally can come into view.
Toward is a hopeful word because it has lots of potential and possibilities because it simply opening up a direction. But giving toward action, making it move in a direction, is much easier said than done.
The image at the top of this post was a small window in a very old church. When I travel, I often find my way to a church. I love the architecture and often they have beautiful gardens that are open even if the church is not. I find much peace and comfort sitting in these locations. That little window was located on a spiral staircase and I was just fascinated by it. The way the light came through it reminded me of different perspectives. I include that image here because perspective—how we see/how I see—common things differently is so important in trying to figure out what direction to go to. Perspective can change the direction or confirm that you are indeed going the best way. One cannot move toward anything without a sense of perspective and a strength to understand what that perspective may mean and then act upon it.
Serres’ conception of prepositions being pre-positions reminds us that the power of what direction, what position, which way to move toward lies within us. We can choose the path and then take a step toward it. There’s a necessary strength needed to make decision and to take action. A strength of different kinds and proportion to embody the hope that toward can give to us.
So in 2025, I so hope you can gather your strength and perspective to find your way toward….whatever your heart needs and desires.
And as always, wishing you health, peace, and joy.
#(Well, it is work. If you have a job like mine where research is a big part of it, then reading is a big part of this job. But random reading is, well, just random.)
&(pp. 105-6 in English version of Conversations)
&&(p. 102 in English version of Conversations)