THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

Chapter Nineteen and Twenty Excerpts

Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous

What Guidance Counselors Don’t Ask

In the spring of 1963, I applied to Yale University’s graduate engineering school and was awarded a full-tuition fellowship. I accepted—but it later proved to be a mistake. Despite graduating cum laude in electrical engineering, my heart was elsewhere.

Graduate school would instruct me in control systems for rockets. What drew me more were the humanities, which explored self-control of base desires and the inner circuitry of the human psyche, with its nonlinear feedback loops.

So why did I accept Yale’s offer? Prestige, mostly—and the unspoken hope of pleasing my father. I quieted my doubts. A mediocre engineer could make a decent living, while even gifted writers often could not. Financial security seemed the sensible choice.

At the time, the decision felt responsible. The Cold War framed everything. Engineering promised relevance, funding, and national purpose. Dreaming of a Ph.D. in engineering and a research career at NASA, the romance of space exploration held me star-struck, recently inspired by President Kennedy’s Moon speech in September 1962.

The humanities felt too indulgent by comparison. I could return to them later. Credentials first; fulfillment could wait.

That Faustian bargain began to unravel almost immediately.

I remember sitting in my first lecture hall, notebook open, pencil poised, waiting for the moment when the material would come alive. It never did. The room smelled faintly of chalk dust and damp wool coats. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The professor faced the board and filled it with equations—long chains of symbols written quickly, erased just as quickly.

I copied them carefully, line after line, but nothing connected within me. There was no explanation of why any of it mattered in life, no gut intuition behind the complex formulas. When a student raised a hand, the pause felt unwelcome. Answers were brief and curt. Even then, before I could name it, I sensed the criteria: absorb, replicate, and advance—

or fall away.

Only later did I understand the system I had entered. Graduate science and engineering faculties were already chained to the “publish or perish” mandate, with little time or incentive left for practical teaching. Lesson plans were rigid; quizzes mechanical; feedback minimal.

Years later, that early unease resurfaced during a conversation with my nephew’s girlfriend, who was struggling over her own college plans. We were seated in a buffet-style restaurant, our voices overlapping, plates clattering. When I asked what she really loved doing, her answer was almost lost in the noise. Then she leaned forward and said she loved fashion design. What struck me was the clarity of what I had failed to ask of myself years earlier.

Even back in 1963, sitting in that lecture hall, I had felt a similar confusion—and quietly recognized that I had entered the wrong room. I just didn’t yet know why.

From the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.

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