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.