“He teaches well that lives well”

Somewhere in some rendering of Don Quixote, there seems to linger a line from Sancho Panza which says: “He teaches well that lives well. That’s all the divinity I can understand.”¹ It is profound, subtle, simple: “He teaches well that lives well.” This touches upon the question of our influence on others, what people see in us and feel from us, when the stage is formally set, and when informally it isn’t. Teaching isn’t just saying something. It isn’t just the words we speak in the classroom, or the pulpit, or on finger-pointing occasions when we are laying down the law. It isn’t something we can turn on and off at any given hour, because we are visible also at other hours. It is what we do, what we think, what we condone, what we condemn. It is both the subtle and the obvious things that make up what we are. “He teaches well that lives well.” Sometimes we speak as if just setting an example were enough, but it isn’t so much something we set as it is everything we are. Parents, teachers, everyone, and all of us are an example, no matter what we do—or don’t do. Whether we are honest or dishonest, concerned or indifferent, fair or unfair, we are an example of some sort, every hour and every instant. The important point is what kind of example? Where are young and impressionable people going if they go where we’re going, if they do what we’re doing, if they think what we’re thinking—if they became what we are? And there is really no way for anyone to separate himself into segments, to say at this hour I will teach this, at another hour I will teach something else; for a teacher teaches what he is himself as well as teaches his subject—and so does a parent; so do companions; so does a community. And so we could say with Sancho: “He teaches well that lives well”—and might put it also in the opposite: He doesn’t teach well who doesn’t live well. It is a sobering lesson to learn.