Today, I did several things in the morning. First off, I met someone for coffee before they had to go to work. Afterwards I went to Pepboys to get my tires rotated. Apparently this is a 2 hour process which I wasn't aware of but at least it was free, right? Having been held up so long at Pepboys I was consequently late for my therapist appointment by about a half hour.
My therapist was pleased to see that I was doing better since having taken some time off work. She asked me when it was in my life that I felt the most successful. I replied that I felt the most satisfied and therefore the most successful when I was on the mission field with a team serving people overseas. She said she saw the same thing in me and said I seem to thrive on new things and a lack of structure and get kind of bogged down when I have to do the same work everyday and get bored rather easily.
I guess I hadn't thought of it like that, but it makes a lot of sense in regards to my work. I usually do fine in the fall of each school year when there are a bunch of new things around me, new students, new colleagues, new challenges and so on. Come January after a 2 week break though, and I start getting depressed. Part of that has to do with the time of year. It's a good thing I live in Florida because if I still lived in Illinois I can't imagine how difficult it would be for me during the winters. Someone suggested to me that perhaps it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, that i kind of set myself up for an episode of depression. It has been a repeating pattern for the last three years but this year I took a more proactive approach and sought counseling out before the depression hit and it hit nonetheless.
Maybe I'm just different than the average person in my strengths and abilities. Maybe a lot of our students who end up dropping out of high school are the same way. One of my friends is a great entrepreneur but wasn't all that successful in school and didn't go onto college when he graduated from high school. He's doing great in his field because that's how his mind works.
Ever since I've started going overseas I've always seemed to thrive in new environments. To a lot of people that's the scariest thing they can imagine. For me, it really makes me happy and joyful even. A couple years ago I took an 8 month round the world trip. It seems almost like a dream now and a lot of people were quite jealous of me when I took it. I dare say though that not everyone would've enjoyed it. I lived out of a backpack for 8 months, not too many people could handle that I don't think. Many people thrive on structure, but I'm different in that way. I like things to be mixed up. When I went to Kenya in 2006 I can remember enjoying watching my teammates get super frustrated when things didn't start on time. My whole thought process was similar to the adage 'when in Rome.' Give me a book and an ipod to pass the time and I can go for hours if I have to wait. In fact, I was actually looking forward to Pepboys at first because I wanted to do some reading, I just started stressing when I realized I was going to be a half hour late to my appointment with my therapist.
In my opinion, it's time we start measuring success differently. As a nation, we measure success as GDP which tells us nothing of how our people are doing with their health or overall well-being. We have great material wealth in this country but our people, including your's truly, are more depressed than ever before. As educators, we measure student success by how they perform on multiple choice tests. What if a child doesn't think that way? Wouldn't we be better off having them create something? Which shows a more thorough understanding of something - creating something with guidelines or simply marking one of four questions? In church we usually measure success by the three B's my pastor calls it; butts, bucks, and baptisms. How does that measure how deep someone is in their walk with Christ? How'd we come to focus more on converts than disciples anyways? In business it's always about the bottom line and profit margins. What if we started measuring success by how a business was meeting a local need or by how many people they got off welfare by providing sustainable work and income for them? This would truly be a paradigm shift, wouldn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment