Many of us live through a routine that envelops our typical working day. Days become months, and then years as we live the “busyness” of our existence, delivering what we are required to, where we are required to, and in the process becoming part of a large chain of events that keeps the wheel of life moving.
This is our daily world. We meet, write, serve, cook, teach, present, dance, entertain, read, manufacture, greet, shout, cry, laugh, buy and sell. These make up the world as we know it. We are a part of this world. We move it and it moves us. But being a small part of a large moving wheel may not always afford us the time and energy to look at our life from a distance. There are many barriers to this exercise, not the least of which is the paucity of time. After a hard day’s work, we are grateful we can hit the pillow or even the hard ground, and sleep, as the cliché goes, “like a log”. That is bliss. That is something to be grateful for. Those of us who do that are in many ways more successful than we can imagine. But then we wake up, and it’s back to the routine.
In other words, being at the centre of the picture does not always help us see, let alone understand or appreciate the picture. To do that, we need to keep the object of our vision at a distance, or hold the image beyond what in optometry is called the “Least Distance of Distinct Vision” (LDDV). We can use this frame to look at our life and the lives of those who impact us and are impacted by us.
In other words, being at the centre of the picture does not always help us see, let alone understand or appreciate the picture. To do that, we need to keep the object of our vision at a distance, or hold the image beyond what in optometry is called the “Least Distance of Distinct Vision” (LDDV). We can use this frame to look at our life and the lives of those who impact us and are impacted by us. It requires us to pause, think and then inquire into what our work, our life, our exertions truly mean for us and for others. This then is the art of reflection and it is positioned as the highest form of learning. Reflections carry the capacity to clarify our thinking, push our learnings, and enable us and others draw from our work in ways we cannot while we are doing that work.
Reflections carry the capacity to clarify our thinking, push our learnings, and enable us and others draw from our work in ways we cannot while we are doing that work.
In the book “Reflection in the Writing Classroom”, author Kathleen Blake Yancey discusses the difference between “knowing-in-action” and “reflection-in-action”. The former engages a “routinised response” whereas the latter calls for “novel responses based on new ways of seeing the situation, the purpose, the audience, the genre, and hence the material”. She quotes Donald Schon:
Reflection-in-action has a critical function, questioning the assumptional structure of knowing-in-action. We think critically about the thinking that got us into this fix or this opportunity; and we may, in the process, restructure strategies of action, understandings of phenomena, or ways of framing problems.
The argument is presented in clear light by the Rev. William Sutton, S.J, who writes:
The unphilosophic man only knows himself in others, thinks of himself as related to others, instinctively flees from himself; being by himself is living death to him…Philosophic man is a world to himself-never less alone than when alone, for as such omnia sua secwm portat. His possessions are one -reflection. How he got it, is not easy to say. He spent a good number of years reading and mastering what others had thought and taught. He found great difficulty in coming at their minds and experienced great pleasure after the toil, as thought revealed itself to his thought, like far-off stars which one sees through a telescope when he looks long into the black firmament. They come out from the deep dark sky around-so small, so still, so clear, meaning so much, so easily lost, if one is careless. After awhile he found himself seeing the same thing in different ways…
The pandemic and the consequent lock down have forced a situation that many of us could not have imagined or prepared for. In some ways, we are more anxious, stressed and troubled. In other ways, we have slowed down, changed the daily routine and are already somewhere near the LDDV that can enable a relook at our lives, our work and the way we make meaning out of these.
At this time, we ask that we take the opportunity to re-look at our lives and our work. This will help us raise new questions, explore new ways of answering them, open up new conversations, rethink some of the goals and look at other engagements in a perspective that was hitherto not available to us.
The pandemic and the consequent lockdown have forced a situation that many of us could not have imagined or prepared for. In some ways, we are more anxious, stressed and troubled. In other ways, we have slowed down, changed the daily routine and are already somewhere near the LDDV that can enable a relook at our lives, our work and the way we make meaning out of these.
Helping us launch on this exercise is the complete unstructured nature of the dairy that we expect. You write 500 words or 5,000. You write daily or weekly or fortnightly or occasionally. You discuss any topic, subject, conversation, note or thought. You ask questions that you may answer or leave unanswered. The diary project invites you, in short, to take the brush, and go a carefree journey to paint a picture that may look quite wild or unexpected to others but represents your inner conversations, concerns, aspirations, ideas...
It is not always easy to reflect. Many writers tell us they don't know where to go. A good enough starting point can be a simple exercise of looking at the daily routine, to study how it has changed and what this change tells us. In this exercise, we begin writing about the change and documenting it, then asking questions about the change, checking if we like it or not, and then asking again why is this the case. A small beginning can make way for some deeper reflections that carry the potential of changing ourselves and others and taking us to a plane very different from the one we might usually operate in.
The unphilosophic man only knows himself in others, thinks of himself as related to others, instinctively flees from himself; being by himself is living death to him…Philosophic man is a world to himself-never less alone than when alone, for as such omnia sua secwm portat.
Some of these exercises are well established methods of inquiry in the hugely popular field of Action Research.
You start somewhere, perhaps anywhere. The idea is to not work “through mathematical models or theories but ‘in the flesh’, through ‘being in it’…exploring the grittiness and granularity of the real world,” as Dr. Jean Boulton and her co-authors say it so well in the book “Embracing Complexity”.