Energized

Organizing an event is an anxious high wire act. After all the details, all the plans, all the money, all the publicity, all the anticipation, the moment arrives, and you teeter between success and failure. The whole event is nothing, literally no thing, until it begins.

So watching people fill our conference room, name tags dangling from their necks, programs in front of them, and greeting the eight invited presenters as they arrive, and then to have it all begin -- it's an astounding transformation. Possibility suddenly, inexplicably becomes reality. Out of nothing, seemingly -- because all the work has produced nothing but a promise and a opening -- something appears, something that is actually happening.

In short, the first session of the conference came off. The keynote address at Hendrix College was everything we could have hoped for. And no matter what happens tomorrow in the final two sessions, a conference exists. The ICTE is real.

Tomorrow I'll talk about an unexpected benefit of bringing prominent people to talk to your students. For now, I'm going to relax and bask in the success -- which is to say, the reality here now that was not here at 2:30 pm this afternoon.