(Posted by Himanee)
My colleague Sue Jefts and I met this afternoon for a couple of hours to discuss our project to create a workshop on personal sustainability. The idea for such a workshop emerged last year after we created a successful two-hour presentation called The Poetics of Sustainability for a conference on transliteracy, teaching, and technology last year that focused on our college's response to students, faculty, and staff affected by Hurricane Sandy. We also had begun work with two other colleagues on a course in what our college calls educational planning that would be centered on building sustainable careers, professions, communities, and lives; and we both were members of our college's sustainability committee. In the latter role, we had helped to developed two additional conference presentations on sustainability as well as a webinar for students on incorporating interests in the topic into their studies.
We presented our workshop proposal to a year-long institute for mentoring, teaching, and learning that our college supports. The proposal was accepted with an encouragement that we try and narrow our topic.
I'm good at responding to constructive feedback (or at least I think I am) so I immediately began searching for ways to scale down the idea. But as Sue and I talked to each other and shared our thoughts with others, the project kept getting bigger and bigger -- to the point that it felt almost too large to be, well, sustainable. In a move that might seem to run counter to the very mission of inclusion, I started to resist approaches that did not match my vision of what sustainability was.
My resistance was rooted at least partly in discomfort. I didn't want to advocate an understanding of sustainability that I personally did not -- or could not -- support myself with words or actions. At the same time, I felt increasingly that I lacked the scholarly expertise to address such a huge project. I also began to doubt my own understandings of what sustainability meant. Was it about a reduction of resources? Was it about getting away from the built environment and going out into nature? Was it about giving up meat and becoming a vegan?
I had a couple of months of release time, so I put my active role in the project on hold and went off to work on other research projects and to ponder what sustainability meant.
The more I pondered, the more I began to feel that there was no one right way to define the term at all. Yet, it seemed that sustainability was something important, especially when one started to think of it at a personal level. Sustain means to last, to hold, to prolong, to continue, to keep going. It is the opposite of contract, release, cease, stop, discontinue. On a personal level, it seems to be about making ways for the things that make your own life joyful, energizing, and fulfilling while being cognizant that your own life doesn't exist in a vacuum. Because we are social creatures, a sustainable life for the self is also a sustainable life for a community and perhaps for a life. And … and … and … the idea gets bigger and bigger.
So walking away from the project for a bit caused me to walk into my self. And, it seems, that my life -- on both a personal and communal level -- seemed to grow more sustainable in the process. As I thought about how writing brought joy, energy, and fulfillment to life, I became a regular twice-a-day (and sometimes three times a day) writer. As I harvested beans and planted fall garlic, I began to appreciate even the tiniest connections between returning nutrients to the earth and feeding both bodies and souls. And, as I scrimped and saved and tried to get my life cleared of debt and my household on a workable budget, my financial pressures started to ease. I suddenly found myself feeling like I had more than enough, even though nothing financially had changed. Overall, it seemed, there was more of everything. More time to write. More time to garden. More time to exercise. More resources available. More time for friends and colleagues. More time for students.
Nothing had changed, except for me.
Sue divulged today in our time together that she had experienced a similar evolution. Her workload, which had felt out of her control, suddenly seemed to be within her control. She equated this shift to "doing the workshop on herself."
I felt overjoyed by her phrase "doing the workshop on herself" because it seemed to ease the pressure of coming across as an expert, of knowing all there was to know about sustainability and about what it would take to do things right. It also seemed to reinforce the point that what living a sustainable life meant would differ for nearly everyone.
We hope in the coming months to distribute a survey that will give us a sense of what potential participants might like to explore in workshop on personal sustainability, and think we might be able to create our workshop from that. We also hope to initiate a strong and potentially creative conversation on what personal sustainability means through presentations at upcoming conferences for our college's community, and to continue to build our dialogues on sustainable lives from that point. Another colleague has developed a workshop on sustainable mentoring -- one of the most important services our college offers its students -- and has suggested that she might be able to work with us in further development. To that end, we also are hoping to have her present her workshop to the faculty, professionals, administrators, and support staff who are affiliated with our center. Our hope at this point is that sustainable thoughts might lead to sustainable actions, and that others will see how doing the workshop on themselves could make a difference.
