I'll be flying to Washington, DC on September 23 to participate over the weekend in the Peace Corps' fiftieth anniversary festivities.  I spent three wonderful years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, teaching English and ancient history at Tafari Makonnen School from 1964 to 1967, and I'm really looking forward to seeing several old friends from my Peace Corps days. 

Making my travel arrangements this past weekend, I got to thinking about how I'd made the decision to join the Peace Corps in fall 1963, almost a half-century ago.  I was in my senior year at the University of Illinois-Urbana that fall, and had been admitted to Illinois' law school for the fall 1964 semester.  My course was set, at least for the next 3 1/2 years, so I could just enjoy my last year at U of I without agonizing over my near-term future. 

So there I was walking through the U of I student union that fall, when I came upon a Peace Corps recruiting booth.  I stopped, without thinking about anything in particular, and said something like, "Well, about the only thing I'd be good at is teaching - I'm terrible at working with my hands - but I suppose you don't really need many teachers."  The person staffing the booth corrected me, pointing out that the Peace Corps was sending thousands of teachers all over the world.  "Why don't you come back this evening and take an aptitude test?" she said.

Right there at the recruiting booth, in the space of maybe five minutes, I made a "snap" decision.  Now, I was tremendously inspired by President Kennedy, who was elected in November of my freshman year at Illinois and who founded the Peace Corps, and I was devastated by his assassination.  But I can't honestly say that I consciously thought about the idea of service standing there at the recruiting booth; it was more like, "There's got to be more to life!"  I recall saying to myself as I stood there, "Doug, you spent 18 years in a small town in Southern Illinois, and the next four years a little over a hundred miles away in Urbana.  You're 20 years old, and you've never traveled farther than Chicago, you've never even flown in a plane.  Do you really want to spend the next three years in Urbana becoming a lawyer?  Why not just go for adventure?" 

Anyway, to make a long story short, that evening I took the aptitude test, and a couple of months later was informed I'd been "pre-admitted" to the Peace Corps - guaranteed a place but not assigned to a country.  Did I have any preferences?  My roommate, Doug Criner, and I batted around possibilities and decided Africa was the place to be.  With newly-freed former colonies all over the continent, it was an exciting place and a battleground in the American-Soviet Cold War.  So I sent in my request for an assignment somewhere in Africa.  Only a couple of months later, I was on my way - my first plane ride - to Los Angeles for three months of training in the Ethi III group at UCLA, and in September, joining members of my group in New York City, I set off for Addis Ababa.

Those three years in Ethiopia were a wonderful experience.  Imagine:  in my early twenties, living in my own house with two other teachers, teaching hundreds of kids in grades 8 through 11, traveling up and down the Nile River one summer and another visiting Rome, Venice, Berlin, and London.  I returned to the States for graduate school in the summer of 1967 a far different man than the pretty naive and inexperienced boy who'd flown to UCLA three years earlier.

Thinking this weekend about my fateful decision almost 50 years ago to join the Peace Corps, I realize that it wasn't just the kind of impulsive, what-the-hell, "gut" decision that it appears to be on the surface.  I recall what Virginia says in The Blind Visionary about  her "snap" decision in 2000 to leave Purdue and start all over at the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind as a vocational rehabilitation student.  She makes the point that a lot of thinking went into this dramatic, life-altering decision before making it, but it wasn't all that conscious.  Facts were being gathered, but not as part of some kind of formal planning process.  I think that's what happened with me.  Yes, I was enrolled in law school for the coming year, but my mind was obviously working away - largely unbeknownst to me on another strategy that more closely fit who I really was and what was good for me. 

I guess all of this is to say that "going with your gut" can be a pretty effective way of making important decisions.   Of course, you might make some dumb ones, too, but at least listen very seriously to your gut and don't fall victim to the siren song of comfort and familiarity!