A loaded term?

I've been thinking about the term "sustainability" and this blog, which I created shortly after the July 2013 Summer Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning but have not been very active at maintaining.

What does it mean to be sustainable? I feel like I turned that question over in my head so many times that the very thought of the word frustrates me to no end.

I have come to conclude that sustainability is a loaded term. Talking about sustainability with others can wear me out because my idea of what is sustainable bumps up against others’ conceptions of what is not. And, of course, the opposite is true. This has made writing about sustainability a challenge because I feel as if I am not an expert on the topic. All I know is that I think about living sustainably a lot as I move through the rhythm of each passing day.

           

          I particularly think about living sustainably as I work in the garden. Much of my sustained time in the garden involves pulling weeds, a task that I find quite therapeutic. I usually rub a good amount of a mosquito repellent/sunscreen on, and don a straw hat before working in the sun. I find that weeding is best done in mid-afternoon when the mosquitoes, deer flies and other insects that populate the Adirondacks are less active. I usually down on my butt in the dirt, pulling out tall grass and the ever-persistent dandelions and stinging nettles that populate our land with my bare hands. I have mild allergies to birch and an air-borne mold that is present in our soil, which helps me further appreciate the privacy of weeding, as I can let my nose run and my sinuses clear themselves out without worrying about appearances.

            Clearing is the task of weeding. Our grass grows tall and fast. I do not think it's all that harmful to the garden because it seems to trap moisture down near the roots, which keeps the edible foods we sow well hydrated. But as I clear the grass, the garden plants bounce to life -- I swear they bounce -- with a certain level of joyfulness. One hour, two hours pass, and the wheelbarrow near the edge of the area where I'm weeding fills. Below me and all around me are clean patches of soil, the results of my labor. As the space is cleared, other, more functional plants have room to grow.

            Clearing is what I did last Thanksgiving when I moved from the office I had been occupying for about two and a half years to an empty space down the hall. The move gave me a good opportunity to sift through papers, files, books, and journals -- and to recycle and donate many items for which I no longer had use. It also gave me a chance to reorganize my space in accordance with fang shui principles (which I had studied once before but hardly am an expert in) as well as the understanding I had gained of how to best do my job over the past few years of doing it.

            My position is that of assistant professor. That means that while my job description is vague, my official responsibilities and personal projects and initiatives are infinite. Officially, I teach; supervise independent studies; mentor students who have a variety of personal and professional interests; oversee six courses which includes reviewing, revising, and creating curricula as well as supervising approximately a dozen adjuncts; serve my college and community through participation in a variety of committees and special projects; and devote a fair amount of my personal and professional time to scholarly development.

            When I first joined the college, the job seemed daunting because there was so much. I attempted to organize my office and my computer desktop in a way that would always have my student folders close at hand, the books for my classes at my fingertips, and separate folders -- both electronic and paper -- for every single college related activity with which I was involved. I kept e-mails stored indefinitely, and reacted to every single e-mail that I received from a member of the college's support staff or administrative offices as if it were the most essential data to my job. By the start of "year three" on the job, I realized that I didn't need to do all that, and that data that had seemed vital in the first three months on the job didn't need daily checking. My office reorganization plan reflected that shift. To put it mildly, a lot of things were weeded out.

            Clearing also has been reflected in my efforts to establish priorities. Some people draw a line between the personal and professional. I used to draw that line, too, until I realized that my line of work necessarily involves a bleeding of one into the other. With that in mind, living in a sustainable way came to gain a new direction: Instead of asking myself how to reduce my time in front of my computer or how to create a stronger separation between work life and home life, I started considering what was important to my life. In 2012, a very friendly and extremely competent and caring member of the support staff retired. She laughingly described her decision to retire as an opportunity to read more books and to travel more. She was 65. Because I began my academic career later in life, I decided that year that I would plan to retire at age 75. I turned 50 at the end of 2012. So when I asked myself what was important to my life, I considered what I wanted to have accomplished over the next 25 years, and how I would like the planet to look. Those questions proved to be foundational to how I chose beginning in 2013 to articulate my role as a professor (assistant and hopefully someday associate, then full), as a writer, and, in a sense, as a community servant.

            Articulating those goals has changed my relationship to my job. It has made me a better time manager. It may not look that way on the surface. In fact, when I look at a time management tool like a day planner or a how-to guide on writing “to do” lists or at how some of my colleagues seem so effective at organizing their days around working with students and logging into their classes, I do not look like a good time manager at all. But I am good because I do my best to focus on what’s important for me to accomplish in a single day – as a professor, a writer, and community servant.

Initiating Dialogue

I spent more time in my office the past two days than I probably have spent all month. I was there for about nine and a half hours on the first day, and for about eight hours today. The time in my office was well spent, and it reminded me of how fortunate my position in life is, in so many ways. Most of the time, I can set my own schedule; work at home or at the library or in a coffee shop if I wish to; and take days off in the high time of summer to bask in the sun and enjoy life with my husband at our home.

            Returning to the office puts the being-ness of the office back into high gear. I am reminded of multiple unfinished tasks, looming and past-due deadlines, and a clock that seems to tick faster and faster. I chide myself for not getting in early, for wasting time trying to motivate myself to work, and for not being more responsive to the demands of the job.

            I am learning slowly, and often in a rather difficult, uneven, and anxiety provoking way to understand that I have the kind of job where the work will never get done. The best I can hope for is to cross between three and five things off the to-do list each day; the reality is that I'll get one or two items on that list accomplished if I'm lucky.

            And, in the meantime, more things pile up.

            "What does sustainability mean to you?" "When you hear the term sustainability, what words and images come to your mind?"

            These two questions shaped three workshops, discussions, and presentations on the concept of sustainability that I helped develop and facilitate during the past academic year. The questions also are shaping a project on creating sustainable lives that my colleague Susan Jefts and I plan to create over the coming academic year. That project was the reason I spent so much time in my office yesterday and today. The two of us were participating in an Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning organized by our college that was aimed at encouraging faculty and professionals to dig into a project of personal interest over the year.

            I took part in the institute in the previous year, and found it to be a rich experience. I developed a study on Creative Writing as Critical Inquiry, and found that it gave me an opportunity to coach and guide students in writing-related projects. It also helped me develop a deeper, more intentional and much more sustained personal writing practice than I have ever had. The other participants in the institute were exciting and engaged individuals, and I found that being around them as well as the main institute facilitators was a great experience in nurturing and growth.

            That experience, I think, begins to underscore how I would answer the questions above: What does sustainability mean to you? When you hear the term sustainability, what words and images come to your mind?

            When Sue and I submitted our proposal to the institute, our ideas were all over the map. The facilitators urged us to think about what we might want to gain from the institute, and choose a piece of the project to work on. In the two or three weeks leading up to the institute, we gave the question some thought and settled on three goals. Sue worried that we were being too ambitious; I worried that we were not being ambitious enough.

            Perhaps both of us were right. But for different reasons than what we might have envisioned. We were too ambitious in wanting to reach as wide a range of people as we hoped: community groups, faculty members, students, professional and administrative and support persons affiliated with the college, prospective students, and others. But perhaps we also were not ambitious enough in what we wanted to dig deep into. We were, and perhaps still are, nervous about making the personal issues that face all of us -- not just people at our college but in workplaces throughout the United States and post-industrial world the focal point of our project. Among those issues are: overwork, increasingly more work, a rapid rate of diminishing resources available to help us in our work, too much dedication to a job, less and less time and often less and less money to create and enjoy the personal lives that we love.

            "There's something very personal about this," remarked one other participant at the institute, in a small-group session. "It makes me want to be a part of it."

            "I am beginning to wonder if being sustainable is sustainable," added a second participant, in a conversation with Sue and myself.

            I left the institute feeling tired by the intense pace of conversation and brain activity but inspired by the feedback we received. Sue and I decided that we would revise our three goals so that we would spend the next year creating

            a) a workshop for students;

            b) a professional development activity for faculty, professionals, and support staff at the college; and

            c) a blog where we could regularly reflect on our activities and learnings about sustainability over the year.

            We also found a lot of energy in listening and interacting with others. The first participant I cited is going to join our project by providing resource materials and perhaps helping us create the workshop itself. The second participant is going to serve as a liaison between us and the college's Student Affairs Committee, and we are going to incorporate her burgeoning scholarly work on emotional labor into our workshops. A third participant will hopefully join us through a joint sharing of workshops: she has created a workshop on the sustainability of mentoring (the term used at our college for the close advising and degree plan development that all faculty and many professional staff members do with our students, who are primarily adults over thirty). We are hoping to host the workshop at the location in the college where we work, and to support her work with newly hired faculty members and others in sharing our thoughts on balancing our professional, personal, scholarly, and creative lives.

            We hope that this blog will be a useful way for us to keep track of our work, and for others to learn alongside us about what it means to live a sustainable life in what appear to be increasingly unsustainable economic and social conditions.