What's Worth Doing?

Here is my favorite "zen" question:

What is it that you are not doing
while you are busy doing
what it is you are doing?

I like this saying for at least two reasons. The first is that I made it up myself! The second is that when I reflect upon it from time to time, it helps me tweak my priorities.... and I'm needing to tweak right now.

As you have noticed, I have been posting less frequently. What I have not been doing (writing a post each week) is because of what I am doing (teaching three social work classes at USM).

Both pursuits are extremely important to me; and yet, at times I find myself torn and wishing I could spend lots more time doing both. (I've also not been quilting, but let's not even go there!) Since my students are my newest readers as well as my current responsibility, I write today's post for them. It's about priorities.

On the first day of class, their faces were as bright and shiny as the blank pages of their new notebooks. But now, with pages of scribbled notes they may not be able to decipher at exam time, they appear to be asking:

"What am I doing here?"
"What's this all for?"
And above all, "What am I missing out on while I'm doing this?"

In other words, the realization of the enormous commitment they have made to becoming professional social workers has hit them hard.

All of us, students or not, face the challenge of what's worth doing. The greatest struggles arise when two or more vital pursuits compete for our limited time and energy.

The usual advice - to "examine and adjust your priorities" - never works for me. It suggests that if you were to examine your heart, you'd see that one priority has more weight than another. But my heart holds dear many people and many pursuits. It would be a Solomon's choice to pick one.

When two or more pursuits are equally compelling in your life (and I believe that this is often the case), you need to understand how the two are related: how they complement and inform one another. When you do that, you are less likely to feel that you are stealing from one to do the other. When I write, my teaching improves. When I teach, my writing improves. When I'm doing one, I don't have to feel guilty about not doing the other because, in a way, I'm doing both.

Now that may sound like compromising the quality of both endeavors. But my thinking is guided by something William James once said:

"The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it."

Applying that principle, teaching and writing are both worth doing. And I don't believe that James meant spending your life doing some one thing that would make you famous or for which statues would be built in your honor. You see, he also said:

"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions, and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets..."

So, I think I'll tend to my rootlets. Maybe one of them will lead me back to quilting.

Copyright 2008 starfishdoc