“Good morning,” said the little prince.
“Good morning,” said the merchant.
Thus opens a scene from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which first returned to my mind a year ago as I tried to show my students that something essential is lost when we outsource our thinking—even to something as efficient as AI.
In the book, the merchant is selling pills designed to quench thirst. People who take one per week are freed from the need to drink water. The little prince, with his simplicity of heart, is able to reveal the absurdity of such attempts at efficiency:
“Why are you selling those?” the little prince asked.
“Because they save a tremendous amount of time,” the merchant replied. “Experts have done the calculations. You save fifty-three minutes every week.”
“And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?”
“Anything you like…”
The little prince fell silent.
“As for me,” he said at last, “if I had fifty-three minutes, I would walk—slowly—toward a spring of fresh water.”
This year, for the second time, I taught a course that, in a way, felt like a leisurely stroll toward a fountain. It’s called Spiritual Exercises and is part of the major in Transformative Education, though many students arrive out of curiosity. What we seek in this class is something that is both very precise and of the utmost urgency today: whatever keeps our deepest questions alive—the thirst for meaning that refuses to go away. In this course, the goal matters less than the path. And to walk, we begin by clearing space.
For an hour and forty-five minutes, twice a week, we set technology aside. If attention wandered, it wandered inward—into memory, into restlessness, into thought. We returned, deliberately, to writing by hand. I distributed small notebooks—bright, almost childlike—that became our companions. The “notebook rule” was simple: what is written there belongs to you and can be brought to any test, any conversation—even the mid-term oral exam. And slowly, something happened: memory became dense, words took root, and the classroom became more human.
The course unfolded in four movements.
The first, The World We Live In, asks us to look without flinching at our contemporary lives. We live in a world of loneliness masked by noise, where we can feel alone even when surrounded by people. The quiet fatigue of relationships never quite begins, and the immersion in our phones consumes our days. We ask what holds us back from “spiritual exercises”—concrete actions and activities that allow us to reflect on what is happening to us—in our questions and in our intuitions about possible answers.
We start by discussing “This Is Water,” a commencement address by David Foster Wallace, who invites us to resist the dull gravity of the “default setting,” that inward collapse of attention that renders the world outside ourselves almost invisible.
Then we encounter the famous psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who, in his book The Anxious Generation, highlights the effects of excessive technology use, including spiritual degradation. Though he calls himself an atheist, he declares that, in order to describe human beings, he cannot help but use religious language (maybe because we are religious beings?). He says it plainly: we carry within us a God-shaped hole that we try to fill with whatever we can but it does not hold. The students recognize this immediately; there is no need to persuade them. They know the pull of the phone, the quiet compulsion, the way attention fractures, and the neglect of their own hearts. And yet, they also speak—sometimes hesitantly—of another possibility: of gestures, however small, that seem to gather the self back together.
Even our viewing of “Nosedive,” an episode of the cynical British TV series Black Mirror, becomes a kind of parable in our classroom. The episode depicts how, in a world governed entirely by ratings, where every gesture is calculated, it is the flawed, unguarded figures who appear most alive—more fragile, perhaps, but also more real.
In the second movement, Witnesses of Spiritual Exercises, we encounter men and women who, even in dire circumstances, have never given up on practicing “spiritual exercises.” A visiting scholar introduced us to Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), a young Dutch Jewish woman who wrote letters and diaries from the Westerbork Transit Camp, where she and thousands of other Dutch Jews awaited their transport to Auschwitz. Surrounded by destruction, she remained attentive to beauty, to music, to the presence of others and the need to care for them, and to God. Her life is a journey, from being a “kneeler in training” to someone who cannot live without God.
A similar journey can be found in Dorothy Day’s (1897–1980) long loneliness that slowly becomes a longing; in the burning colors and restless letters of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890); in the quiet, sustained attention of Patrick Bringley, who, after a great personal loss, chooses to quit his job at a prestigious magazine and stand still—by working for ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—until beauty begins, slowly, to speak again, as he tells in his memoir All the Beauty in the World.
The “notebook rule” was simple: what is written there belongs to you and can be brought to any test, any conversation—even the mid-term oral exam. And slowly, something happened: memory became dense, words took root, and the classroom became more human.
At the McMullen Museum, guided by Carina, a PhD student in Formative Education, we practiced contemplation: not consuming, not passing through, but remaining in front of artworks. Miriam, a professional pianist and a mother of six, came to visit us and turned an ordinary Gasson classroom into a concert hall. She gave us Bach, Chopin, and Schubert, but also a personal testimony: for her, music is not a luxury, but a necessity of the soul.
Two Formative Education PhD students accompanied us in understanding the relevance of the body for “spiritual exercises.” Paul spoke of his life with people with disabilities in a L’Arche community, where vulnerability strips away illusion and reveals something essential. Harrison opened up a conversation on sports—not as performance but as a space in which the body itself searches, strains, and reaches beyond itself.
The third movement—Spiritual but Not Religious?—challenges a nonsensical but oft-repeated self-descriptor of our age. Here we are accompanied by Augustine of Hippo and Ignatius of Loyola—two restless seekers who discovered, each in his own way, that finding does not mean ceasing to search but rather intensifies the quest. To encounter God is not to arrive but to begin again. As Gregory of Nyssa writes, life unfolds “from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end.”
We ended our semester with a long-awaited Spiritual Exercises Workshop. Each student brought something of their own life—an experience, a fragment, a gesture that, somehow, represented for them an exercise of the spirit. They spoke of walking, silence, music, friendship, of moments in which the surface of things gave way, just enough, to reveal a depth.
And listening to them, you begin to recognize it again—that quiet, insistent thirst. A thirst that does not disappear, that cannot be managed or replaced; the thirst that, if we allow it, sets us in motion—slowly, patiently—toward a fountain.
Emanuele Colombo is professor of formative education in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and a research scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.
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