This week, I have been reading through Lois Lowry’s The Giver series, which is actually a set of four separate books. Right now, I am reading Gathering Blue, and its themes of storytelling and choice have serendipitously connected nicely with what I have been discussing in class. I’ve mentioned before that I teach a mental health-themed English composition class, and I open each meeting with an interesting article that we read together and discuss. This week, I was looking for articles about self-care and career burnout for the career profile research essay my students are currently writing. As I scrolled the results list in Google, I clicked one and skimmed over it. It was similar to all the other articles I’d seen, but one line caught my attention. The author’s argument was that we all need to rethink self-care. That we should not be considering self-care as distinct, separate acts we engage in when the stress or anxiety of our lives becomes too heavy to deal with. Instead, we should focus on crafting lives we don’t want to escape to begin with.
That’s the question, isn’t it? How do we create lives we don’t constantly want to escape?
I think the first step is to identify what we actually want our lives to look and feel like, then reverse engineer that to figure out how to live. It is one thing to have lofty goals, and another to have specific actions. So, in our class, we learned about crafting a personal philosophy, which is a lot like a mission statement but for ourselves. Our first step was to review over 100 values and what each meant. Each of us chose 10-20 that stood out to us. From those 10-20 values, we each had to choose 3. Those three are what we used to craft a personal philosophy. Our personal philosophy statements ranged from “If you can be anything, be kind” to “Every situation could be a lesson, every person could be a connection, and every goal can be accomplished” to “It is what it is.” All of us enjoyed thinking about these different values and choosing the ones that seemed most true to our core selves. And, that act of choosing our values was a big part of our exercise because, as Lois Lowry wrote “It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?” Recognizing that we have agency in our lives is what allows us to take action.
Sometimes the action we need is learning to be ok with inaction. Learning to rest, to chill, to be at peace with ourselves and our surroundings. This is something that is a challenge for me, and I have put a lot of time into learning to intentionally do nothing. I want my children to have the gift of recognizing they have the choice to be still. They have the choice to move forward. They have the choice to pause. In this world, we are all rush from day one, and if we want to craft lives we don’t constantly need and want to escape, learning how to step away from the rush and busyness is an important skill.
Sometimes the action we need to practice as we craft the lives we love is that of storytelling. Every single day, we tell ourselves stories about our environment, our motives, about those around us, and about what gives our lives meaning. Recognizing that we can choose the stories we tell ourselves is important. Or, as Mo Gawdat, author of Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy, puts it, “All the thinking in the world, until converted into action, has no impact on the reality of our lives. . .Happiness starts with a conscious choice.”
Moving from rumination, procrastination, and dissociation is choosing to first envision how we wish we were spending our days, identifying what steps will get us there, and then intentionally doing–or not doing–the steps we identified. After all, we are the main characters in our life stories, and “We’re the ones who will fill in the blank places. Maybe we can make it different” (Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue).
Tabitha Bozeman is an instructor at GSCC. Email at tabithabozeman@gmail.com.
