So much depends upon the language we use, the metaphors we live by.

When an assignment says, “Don’t just tell me what you think. Analyze your passage,” I understand that the assignment is really asking for something other than a superficial response. I’m convinced, though, that some part of the student’s brain reads the instruction literally and draws the obvious conclusions: analysis has nothing to do with thinking (it’s an alien exercise in trying to copy the inexplicable things teachers do), and more sadly, “my thoughts are beside the point, irrelevant.”

My own conclusion: the words we use matter, and they matter greatly. I don’t want superficial, thoughtless, or uncommitted responses, but I do very much want to know what the student thinks (no “just” about it), both because I want the student to think, and because I want the student to have the chance to be surprised by the value of their own thoughts before the rest of the lesson continues. “Don’t just tell me what you think”? I shudder. Someone just walked across the grave of higher education.

I had a similar shudder in an otherwise splendid AAC&U session today when a panelist used the phrase “downstream deliverables.” The phrase denoted the necessary, laudable goal of asking grantees to produce evidence of the results they had gotten from the grant monies. Nothing at all wrong with that–except again, that the words and metaphors matter. In this case, the metaphor brings to mind a barge floating downstream, laden with containers of, well, things–things that are probably products, products that are probably delivered to consumers. A fairly brutal metaphor when it comes to the results of messy, aspirational human processes.

Yet I will shift that metaphor into a different context. This conference has been many things for me: an opportunity to break bread and share ideas with the QEP team at VCU, a chance to learn from extraordinary colleagues from the around the world, a season of reflection on what matters most to me as a professor and a leader in higher ed, an opportunity to hear from some wonderfully thoughtful and provocative speakers. It’s been all of that, and more. Some of the most intense moments, however, have been what I will now call “downstream deliverables.” The stream is Time, that ever-rolling stream that in the words of the hymn “bears all its sons [and daughters] away.” What the hymn doesn’t say, however, is that time sometimes bears its sons and daughters back together. During this conference, my own “downstream deliverables,” the people whom the stream of time has borne back to me (and back to them), include a student from two years ago, a student from twenty-two years ago, and a student from thirty years ago; a colleague whom I knew a little during grad school and suddenly, unexpectedly reconnected with after a business conversation led to “you know, you look kind of familiar to me”; a moment in which I saw out of the corner of my eye a mentor (she walked by too quickly for me to hail her); a moment in which I learned that a huge intellectual influence was seated at the back of the room that housed a panel discussion I was honored to participate in.

My deliverables, years and decades down the stream of time, are the lives I’ve touched, and the lives that have touched mine, the thousand acts of kindness, attention, and love, “the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be….” Each time these unexpected meetings occurred, I felt my soul expand, extend, enlarge. Each moment arrived downstream,  carrying not freight but a fullness of being among souls I am privileged and humbled to know. After many years, we are met. My downstream deliverables become a kind of deliverance, and for that I am grateful.