What do you identify with?

• "What cause, interest, enthusiasm, or aspiration do you most identify with?"

To answer my own question:

This is a broadly-posed prompt, we may not all think we have a specific pet cause but we all identify most passionately with something or other, don't we? In this connection, I think of Woody Allen's "Manhattan" and the scene in which he enumerates "the things that make life worth living..." To answer the question, make your list and see if you can designate a #1. My list will include particulars like family, philosophy, teaching, William James, baseball, walking, dogs, beer... but #1 for me has to be the future of life itself. Just call it the cause of humanity.

• James: "the really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" 
• John Dewey: "Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.”

• "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine." John Adams https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond