What I Want from My Life
A Matter of Definition
For most of my conscious life, I have wanted to know, to pursue ideas, to achieve something significant and lasting, and to write. All these desires interrelate, weaving together. Whether actual accomplishment followed plagues me. Life satisfies me in its modicum of compromises at far greater measure than imagined in my romantic youth. I have become bourgeois in habit, a likely good citizen, but not with the original creativity once craved to the point of idiosyncrasy.
Neither do I feel I accomplished much in my 40-year profession in library and information services. I know I developed my skills and understanding and used them to give pertinent and reliable public service as a reference librarian and library director as well as learning direction and coaching in librarianship when an undergraduate and graduate instructor and professor. Yet, I always felt myself to be the principal beneficiary of what I experienced and learned.
As a library consultant and grant administrator, I was never in alignment with the prevailing assumptions and practices of my colleagues. Although I thought I played a pivotal role in the development of library services, I now view that nothing from those days lasts in the way I then envisioned it.
As a result, any hope for success has become a matter of personal satisfaction as though I now return to the romantic idea of egoism that had so captivated me when I was a teenager and college student. Ideals still command my attention, and if I am to achieve any measure of success, I must to be faithful to them: the best in art, equality in life, learning as our vocation, the work in life of making the ideal into the real. Thus far in my ideational world, I am not satisfied that I have done my part to further any of these matters.
What remains for me to do in my latter years? I do not care for wealth, fame, notice or recognition. I crave conversation that transcends the phatic but find it rare if not impossible. I seek thinking that is rational, reflective, self-critical and discerning but find it not only rare, self-justifying at best, a slave to emotion at worst, but seemingly smothering amidst the distractions of contemporary life. I find enjoyment and the reassurance of human competence in the endeavors of my creative forbearers and cumulative heritage of the past in the arts, in philosophy and science, in the expansion of knowledge and the ceaseless quest for it, and in the potentials of the human brain and mind.
Success for me is to make the most of my situation and opportunities according to my highest values.
What in Life Is Most Important?
I want to gain understanding and share it.
I want to do something good, worthwhile, and basic.
I want to leave something lasting at the end of my life.
Ten instances when I felt the most competent, confident, connected, and joyous:
Dates are approximate. In areas marked *, I served multiple roles as researcher, consultant, facilitator, author, editor, and publisher.
1. 1968 – Development of a methodology for teaching reference services based upon real questions, a core of 100 most frequently useful resources, and the practice of question negotiation to the accurate and efficient satisfaction of the questioner.
2. 1969 – “Lyman Beecher and the Lane Seminary Controversy,” a research paper submitted in the course on Puritanism in the graduate program on American intellectual history at the University of Iowa.
3. 1980 - Completion of the novel Phaeton Flight, the story of Frederic Hanreid, an information professional, and Prince Henry Cadly (afterwards Henry II) set in early 39th century Loria.
4. 1984 – Completion of the novel The Rodi. Vodar (afterwards Vodarodi I) discovers his unique place in the history of the Seidonese people; he becomes in his early twenties the founder of Loria, 3000.
5.* 1988 – Completion of background and issues papers for the Minnesota Governor’s Pre-White House Conference on Library and Information Services.
6.* 1997 – Development of the criteria and application process for awarding Minnesota technology grants to library systems.
7.* 1998 – Development of the Long Range Plan and application process for federal Library Services and Technology Act funds.
8.* 1999 – Development of the document on the recommended approach to and procedures for the establishment of co-located public and school library services.
9. 2002-2006 – Service as Administrative Assistant to the State Board of the American Association of University Women – Minnesota under two state presidents.
10. 2007 – Completion of the story “Inheritance.” Louisa Enders at 13 years travels with her two very different grandmothers and learns her actual ancestry as an American, the same summer WWI begins. Intended as Chapter 1 of Progress about the life of small town public librarian through the 20th century.
Five people I most admire, and whose traits I aspire to have:
1. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. No one is superior to Shakespeare in the revealing poetry of language; even his “minor” plays are major to me. He never disappoints but grows with every renewed experience of his work.
2. Gordon Sween, 1911-1980. My father, who led a seemingly ordinary life, has become an exemplar for me due to his self-directed learning, rationality, sense of discipline, family loyalty, and exercise of responsibility.
3. Frederic Bolton, dates unknown. Dr. Bolton was one of my religion professors at St. Olaf College. A student of Reinhold Niebuhr at Princeton, Bolton influenced me with his thoughtful and rigorous approach to Christianity and Christian theology while being honestly critical, but kind and encouraging to a youngster struggling to come to grips with the intellectus quarens fidem (understanding seeking faith) issue.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, born 1929. No contemporary author has written so elegantly and meaningfully for me and my interests in as consistent and beautifully articulate a fashion as has Le Guin. I rejoice that I once heard her in person when she said in reference to The Dispossessed, “I want everyone arguing and discussing over the meaning of what I wrote,” or words to that effect.
5. Patricia Anne Worringer Sween, born 1939. Patty continually impresses me with her understanding of other people, her generosity, and her evenness of temper in dealing with all whom she encounters.
Ranking of ten value areas:
At my stage of development, 70 years old this year in a life of reflection considering what lasts and what transpires, value areas do not mean what they meant to me at earlier stages. I cannot rank them first to last (1 – 10) appropriate to my current stage and for other various reasons; instead, I group them.
A. Faith in a higher power. This area is by theological definition of ultimate concern, yet faith, being the work of God in us, exists without my wanting, willing, or working for it. Ranking here perpetuates a falsity.
B. The areas harder to attain are all of equal high importance to me: Fulfilling relationships, individual accomplishments, making a difference in the lives of others, and legacy (understood as leaving something significant and lasting).
C. The lesser areas cluster to the bottom.
7. Health I seem to have by virtue of inheritance and caution; that is, I am lucky and careful. I do not obsess over my health and know that I will die, probably after a long time, probably soon.
8. Wealth, since I am comfortable with enough already.
9. Fame I regard as shallow and transitory.
10. Fun I regard as even more shallow and insubstantial in the ultimate scheme of things.
My plans for success in 2010:
I will attend more intentionally to how I spend my time on my primary ambitions. I will track my time and quantify it in regards to a schedule I currently regard as ideal in order to hold myself more accountable in aiming for greater success than I have had and thereby attain my chosen ends.
My ideal schedule of a 16-hour waking day has the following areas in priority order. I will try to sleep eight hours out of every 24 even though that is not often the case.
1. Major writing – 4 hours. This year I will finish the first draft of At Last, I Depart. In this novel, Lady Frivovla of Allonor grows from an innocent devotion to her sense of duty into a self-directing and successful champion of her own life. She becomes in time the consort of Vodarodi II King Loria and the progenitor of all the following monarchs for its ensuing thousand-year history.
2. Study/Pre-writing – 3 hours. This year I will do the work necessary to establish the bases necessary for two controversial equity issues: one is the ministry of same-gender couples in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the other concerns mission-based membership in the American Association of University Women.
3. Reading – 3 hours. I will read to completion more novels and other books than I finished in 2009.
4. Organization – 2 hours. I will gain a “house cleaning” and orderly control of my book collection and other files and prepare for the likeliness of moving to a different dwelling and possibly different city.
5. Miscellaneous – 4 hours. These four hours are the elastic cushion for all the routine and irregular instances of life that one must do or are more difficult to anticipate and control.
Note: I assume that most weekends and holidays fall outside the ideal schedule since these days are more interruptible because they invite both travel and interaction with others, chiefly family.
____
I am indebted to Dr. Daniel G. Amen, Magnificent Mind at Any Age (2008), especially chapter 10, “Make Your Own Miracles,” for guidance in thinking through this issue.
For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.
I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.
© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.
Showing posts with label Conduct of life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conduct of life. Show all posts
Friday, January 1, 2010
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Values
The Value of Values
Values are in contention with one another in our society and world. Of that observation there is no doubt even though, at some core, values hold us all together. Some will say that antagonistic extreme positions exaggerate our differences and that the middle majority retain the central position as to the values question. Efforts to sort this out elude easy solution despite continued attention to the subject. Nevertheless, some perspective, however limited, is necessary.
Ideally, values comprise a system of qualities of intrinsic and applied worth, expressed in principles, that are severally and interdependently desirable and beneficial to the people individually and collectively who live under that system. So said, the values bundle needs some unraveling to see if this definition really means what it pretends. The question then becomes how a values system applies to us as persons and citizens. Finally, what ought we to do about that application?
We can identify values by thinking about our human situation in order to discover what quality underlies or should underlie good ways of living together. Good ways, simply put, means everyone benefits and no one gets hurt. The thinking approach to values, we call philosophy. Presumably, everybody has a philosophy of life based on personally integrated values whether they have thought them through or been less rigorous about determining the meaning, consistency and excellence of the values adopted.
Such rigor is not for everyone, and the prevailing way of integrating values into one’s life is to absorb them by living in the received culture. While philosophy exists to determine, examine or clarify values, culture nurtures its values by example and reinforces their adoption through approval of the appropriate responses and disapproval of the inappropriate ones. Cultural anthropologists have found that though every one of 5,000 existing cultures has a value system, all values are relative to the particular home culture and that there is no such thing as universal values. As expected, this professional principle of cultural relativism is also in dispute. While some values may be dysfunctional to social and human well being, universally everyone expects treatment with respect.
Religion or recognition of the spiritual dimension also portends values. I say portends, since not all spiritual expressions come across in the same way as to claims on the lives of their believers or explicitness as found in their history of teaching, dogma, or doctrine. A common element of spiritual systems, however, is that they draw upon sources or revelations that are outside the human experiences of thinking or making empirical discoveries about the world and our lives in it. Thereby values gain another context: we ourselves are not the sum and substance of value; some greater entity outside us, yet still somehow related to us is that sum and substance.
Though these three prominent ways of getting at values – the philosophic, cultural and religious – exist and may be the major ones, they are not the only ones. Besides, of course, these methods overlap. We can think about each approach and develop philosophies of them; we can enrich each avenue to values by our cultural traditions and its history of informants; we can peer beyond human limits through religion as to purpose and holism. Though few of us are professionals, especially concerning technicalities, in philosophy, culture, or religion, we are likely to inhabit each approach and can gain from their methods what we have the will to pursue.
When we look about our resident situation, we find that all three approaches to comprehending values, their systems, and imports fail to bring us into cohesion. Part of the problem is that the United States and most of what we have in the three value-determiners before us is not like most of the 5,000 cultures in the world. They are small, bounded, authoritarian, established, and homogenous. We are large, globally enmeshed, democratic, new and changing, and diverse. The very freedom, individualism and expansiveness that we prize and espouse undercut the stability that value systems are supposed to bring to a society. So, we curse one another for the practice of our values and do not have the wit – collectively at least – to find our way out of this troubling achievement.
As a nation, we have so little cohesiveness because we are a bundle of contradictions. We debate, but the debate causes dissension. We adjudicate for justice, but the decisions divide. We multiply choice, particularly in the economic sphere, and are amazed at the lack of taste, decorum, and civic involvement. We accelerate abundance and then surprised by pollution. We expect even grade school children to take the loyalty oath of the Pledge of Allegiance, but fail to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. We promote globalization, but fail to see ourselves as citizens of the world.
Let us admit that life is complex, but we all start from the same irreducible base. Every individual must sort out their responses to life in five areas. These are the physical conditions of earthly existence, the existence of the self as a distinct entity, the presence of other people, our cultural inheritance, and the possible future. Everything else stems from these five. One may ignore the areas as they choose, but such unconsciousness does not do away with their pressures upon us.
This framework admits that whatever one’s particular culture may be, it has its influences on each of us. But because of the mix of the five areas, no one area is exclusive, and it is dubious to pinpoint any one area, culture included, as dominant when they all interact. We have a difficult enough time fully understanding and directing ourselves with whom we have the greatest proximity and the most control and presumably the fullest knowledge.
Values are the basis on which we consciously or habitually by integration make choices in taking one line of thought, belief or action over another. Values are one cultural product yet remain open, as long as an individual wills it, to personal examination, clarification and redefinition before being adopted, but more significantly after being adopted. Articulated values at variance with the culture when acted upon tend to make critics, rebels, deviants or criminals. Cultures, depending upon the nature of the variance, exert a range of pressures from raised eyebrows to executions in order to gain conformance.
In the physical arena we have issues of the appropriate long-term use of finite natural resources, of population size and viability, of health and of responsibility for the environment in which we cannot but live. For ourselves we face numerous life choices that hover around individual identity, potential, achievement and happiness; here no one can do for us what we must do ourselves. Concerning others, our relationships flow from the private and interpersonal to our roles in the neighborhood, community, economy, political associaton and for the common good. Cultural inheritance, let me emphasize, is a treasure trove of the past up to the very minute during which humanity experienced what we face and need to know if we have wit to learn in order to benefit from such heritage. An evolving culture is open to all of history’s enrichment. By comparison, the future may stretch on as long and potently as the human past, but exactly in what manner we do not know. With such uncertainty comes less clarity and the tendency for less thought and neglect. Thereby, we may be engineering our own extinction and need to consciously chose and create that future most desirable to us.
We cannot address questions of the value-base of culture and society unless we share some working principles. As a career information professional of forty-plus years, I offer the following for consideration.
It is better to know than not know.
·Knowledge, the product of knowing, is imperfect and therefore individuals’ search for truth (the knowledge that is perfect) is unending.
·Consequently, we need to be modest about our own knowledge, and reflective on our own limitations.
·Ambiguity about the certainty of our own knowledge requires psychological security, the realization that our conclusions, though our best at present, are tentative.
·In seeking knowledge and examining our own conclusions, we need criteria, which criteria are also subject to continued examination and improvement.
·Whatever criteria of coherence, currency, verifiability, correspondence with others may be, we must continually test knowledge against experience and attune ourselves to the results.
·We need to be alert to all human weaknesses, especially among ourselves – laziness, distraction, and self-deception – and realize that our knowing requires learning as a continuous endeavor.
·Learning may have its automatic features, that is, learning by living, but the greatest potential for learning comes from focused attention and endeavor to identify and overcome our persistent ignorance and mistaken nature.
In brief, we live profitably by knowledge that we must seek while being humble about what we already know.
I have tried to look deeply into the values question and find that primarily, we are not geared in the mass to share in any but the most token way a commonality on values. Most of our institutions pivot on an assumption of inherent human disagreement and not on the desire for solutions. Our laws arise out of factions where agreements come by compromises at best or overpowering at worst. All these efforts continually model that someone is right while someone else is wrong and that taking up the cudgels, even if the cudgels are words, is the answer.
The answer, the only answer, to our fundamental differences is to be in conversation. Despite the enormous problems identified, global, and often out of our hands, we have plenty of opportunities to do what we can in our spheres of contact to make amends. We can know others face to face, make more friends than enemies, work together for mutual understanding and problem solving, show respect, listen and speak in turn.
In this manner we have a better means to enter the complexity of existence as it is, where always (let us be informed) there is another side. And by conversation, we can find ourselves more fully through our relationships with others. The principal freedom we have and value is the liberating freedom to be neighborly.
_____
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
Roger Sween admits the heavy influence of his family of origin, a preference for reading as learning, certain formative books read when young, a particular Lutheran rendition of Christianity, a penchant for introspection, rationality and judgment, a love of history as the holistic discipline, and the career frustration that most people do not make routine use of the abundant information and intellectual resources available to them.
First written at the Editor’s request and published in Practical Thinking, v.1 no.2 (December 2005) 1-3. Practical Thinking was a joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum. That article is here revised.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to be at the email address given above.
Values are in contention with one another in our society and world. Of that observation there is no doubt even though, at some core, values hold us all together. Some will say that antagonistic extreme positions exaggerate our differences and that the middle majority retain the central position as to the values question. Efforts to sort this out elude easy solution despite continued attention to the subject. Nevertheless, some perspective, however limited, is necessary.
Ideally, values comprise a system of qualities of intrinsic and applied worth, expressed in principles, that are severally and interdependently desirable and beneficial to the people individually and collectively who live under that system. So said, the values bundle needs some unraveling to see if this definition really means what it pretends. The question then becomes how a values system applies to us as persons and citizens. Finally, what ought we to do about that application?
We can identify values by thinking about our human situation in order to discover what quality underlies or should underlie good ways of living together. Good ways, simply put, means everyone benefits and no one gets hurt. The thinking approach to values, we call philosophy. Presumably, everybody has a philosophy of life based on personally integrated values whether they have thought them through or been less rigorous about determining the meaning, consistency and excellence of the values adopted.
Such rigor is not for everyone, and the prevailing way of integrating values into one’s life is to absorb them by living in the received culture. While philosophy exists to determine, examine or clarify values, culture nurtures its values by example and reinforces their adoption through approval of the appropriate responses and disapproval of the inappropriate ones. Cultural anthropologists have found that though every one of 5,000 existing cultures has a value system, all values are relative to the particular home culture and that there is no such thing as universal values. As expected, this professional principle of cultural relativism is also in dispute. While some values may be dysfunctional to social and human well being, universally everyone expects treatment with respect.
Religion or recognition of the spiritual dimension also portends values. I say portends, since not all spiritual expressions come across in the same way as to claims on the lives of their believers or explicitness as found in their history of teaching, dogma, or doctrine. A common element of spiritual systems, however, is that they draw upon sources or revelations that are outside the human experiences of thinking or making empirical discoveries about the world and our lives in it. Thereby values gain another context: we ourselves are not the sum and substance of value; some greater entity outside us, yet still somehow related to us is that sum and substance.
Though these three prominent ways of getting at values – the philosophic, cultural and religious – exist and may be the major ones, they are not the only ones. Besides, of course, these methods overlap. We can think about each approach and develop philosophies of them; we can enrich each avenue to values by our cultural traditions and its history of informants; we can peer beyond human limits through religion as to purpose and holism. Though few of us are professionals, especially concerning technicalities, in philosophy, culture, or religion, we are likely to inhabit each approach and can gain from their methods what we have the will to pursue.
When we look about our resident situation, we find that all three approaches to comprehending values, their systems, and imports fail to bring us into cohesion. Part of the problem is that the United States and most of what we have in the three value-determiners before us is not like most of the 5,000 cultures in the world. They are small, bounded, authoritarian, established, and homogenous. We are large, globally enmeshed, democratic, new and changing, and diverse. The very freedom, individualism and expansiveness that we prize and espouse undercut the stability that value systems are supposed to bring to a society. So, we curse one another for the practice of our values and do not have the wit – collectively at least – to find our way out of this troubling achievement.
As a nation, we have so little cohesiveness because we are a bundle of contradictions. We debate, but the debate causes dissension. We adjudicate for justice, but the decisions divide. We multiply choice, particularly in the economic sphere, and are amazed at the lack of taste, decorum, and civic involvement. We accelerate abundance and then surprised by pollution. We expect even grade school children to take the loyalty oath of the Pledge of Allegiance, but fail to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. We promote globalization, but fail to see ourselves as citizens of the world.
Let us admit that life is complex, but we all start from the same irreducible base. Every individual must sort out their responses to life in five areas. These are the physical conditions of earthly existence, the existence of the self as a distinct entity, the presence of other people, our cultural inheritance, and the possible future. Everything else stems from these five. One may ignore the areas as they choose, but such unconsciousness does not do away with their pressures upon us.
This framework admits that whatever one’s particular culture may be, it has its influences on each of us. But because of the mix of the five areas, no one area is exclusive, and it is dubious to pinpoint any one area, culture included, as dominant when they all interact. We have a difficult enough time fully understanding and directing ourselves with whom we have the greatest proximity and the most control and presumably the fullest knowledge.
Values are the basis on which we consciously or habitually by integration make choices in taking one line of thought, belief or action over another. Values are one cultural product yet remain open, as long as an individual wills it, to personal examination, clarification and redefinition before being adopted, but more significantly after being adopted. Articulated values at variance with the culture when acted upon tend to make critics, rebels, deviants or criminals. Cultures, depending upon the nature of the variance, exert a range of pressures from raised eyebrows to executions in order to gain conformance.
In the physical arena we have issues of the appropriate long-term use of finite natural resources, of population size and viability, of health and of responsibility for the environment in which we cannot but live. For ourselves we face numerous life choices that hover around individual identity, potential, achievement and happiness; here no one can do for us what we must do ourselves. Concerning others, our relationships flow from the private and interpersonal to our roles in the neighborhood, community, economy, political associaton and for the common good. Cultural inheritance, let me emphasize, is a treasure trove of the past up to the very minute during which humanity experienced what we face and need to know if we have wit to learn in order to benefit from such heritage. An evolving culture is open to all of history’s enrichment. By comparison, the future may stretch on as long and potently as the human past, but exactly in what manner we do not know. With such uncertainty comes less clarity and the tendency for less thought and neglect. Thereby, we may be engineering our own extinction and need to consciously chose and create that future most desirable to us.
We cannot address questions of the value-base of culture and society unless we share some working principles. As a career information professional of forty-plus years, I offer the following for consideration.
It is better to know than not know.
·Knowledge, the product of knowing, is imperfect and therefore individuals’ search for truth (the knowledge that is perfect) is unending.
·Consequently, we need to be modest about our own knowledge, and reflective on our own limitations.
·Ambiguity about the certainty of our own knowledge requires psychological security, the realization that our conclusions, though our best at present, are tentative.
·In seeking knowledge and examining our own conclusions, we need criteria, which criteria are also subject to continued examination and improvement.
·Whatever criteria of coherence, currency, verifiability, correspondence with others may be, we must continually test knowledge against experience and attune ourselves to the results.
·We need to be alert to all human weaknesses, especially among ourselves – laziness, distraction, and self-deception – and realize that our knowing requires learning as a continuous endeavor.
·Learning may have its automatic features, that is, learning by living, but the greatest potential for learning comes from focused attention and endeavor to identify and overcome our persistent ignorance and mistaken nature.
In brief, we live profitably by knowledge that we must seek while being humble about what we already know.
I have tried to look deeply into the values question and find that primarily, we are not geared in the mass to share in any but the most token way a commonality on values. Most of our institutions pivot on an assumption of inherent human disagreement and not on the desire for solutions. Our laws arise out of factions where agreements come by compromises at best or overpowering at worst. All these efforts continually model that someone is right while someone else is wrong and that taking up the cudgels, even if the cudgels are words, is the answer.
The answer, the only answer, to our fundamental differences is to be in conversation. Despite the enormous problems identified, global, and often out of our hands, we have plenty of opportunities to do what we can in our spheres of contact to make amends. We can know others face to face, make more friends than enemies, work together for mutual understanding and problem solving, show respect, listen and speak in turn.
In this manner we have a better means to enter the complexity of existence as it is, where always (let us be informed) there is another side. And by conversation, we can find ourselves more fully through our relationships with others. The principal freedom we have and value is the liberating freedom to be neighborly.
_____
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
Roger Sween admits the heavy influence of his family of origin, a preference for reading as learning, certain formative books read when young, a particular Lutheran rendition of Christianity, a penchant for introspection, rationality and judgment, a love of history as the holistic discipline, and the career frustration that most people do not make routine use of the abundant information and intellectual resources available to them.
First written at the Editor’s request and published in Practical Thinking, v.1 no.2 (December 2005) 1-3. Practical Thinking was a joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum. That article is here revised.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to be at the email address given above.
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