Tell me about yourself.

[resonant]

I'm suddenly struck with the desire to know how other people do the things that matter most to them, how they find and follow their passions.

How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?

Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?

Comments

[indywind]

Thanks for asking this question, Res. So many wise and personal and thought-provoking answers... looking through these windows into people's lives, and the veiws are beautiful.

At bottom, my choices & compromises come from reflection about what I need, what I want, in the moment when I face the choice, and what I can predict given what I know then. I've made some choices with this thinking that didn't come out as I hoped, that were expensive or painful or frustrating or just fruitless... but I have positive feelings about even the "bad" outcomes of these self-aware choices--if nothing else, I did the best I could and I learned something from them. Looking back, I feel bad about the choices I made carelessly, because I "should" or I thought someone else wanted me to, or because I was too lazy or afraid to think about it... Even when they came out "well", I didn't feel like the success belonged to me.

Deciding where my heart is, and making time & energy to pursue it... comes out of reflection, as I said. It is important to me to note that it is a two-way process. Looking ahead, I think: I will become "the kind of person who does X" by doing X, so look for choices that allow me to act as the person I want to become, and put my energy where I want it. Looking back I think, the things I have given my time and energy to--the things that wonout in an either-or choice--are the things that have been important to me; thinking something I didn't support through choice & action was important to me is just self-delusion. Does that make sense? These became very important life-organizing principles for me, as I realized them.

A few years ago I decided I wanted to be a person in better physical shape, so I looked for opportunities to choose little changes to work toward that. Now, looking back, I can say that I have become a person who values and pursues fitness, because I run and do weight training and eat healthfully pretty consistently: evidently, that's important to me. Now, I have some interests that I can fairly say are not important to me, because when I have to choose, I don't choose to work at them. Of course, what's important to me can change at any point, based on my situational choices.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I think those little changes are more important than most people think.

I used to read stuff by an educator online; when parents were worried about a weak area in the school their kid went to, she'd tell them, "If the school is basically sound, you can supplement; get a tutor, enroll them in summer classes, whatever." So now I sometimes think like that about my life: maybe I don't need to change everything; maybe I just need to supplement.