{"id":30133,"date":"2023-01-13T15:10:09","date_gmt":"2023-01-13T23:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=30133"},"modified":"2023-01-13T15:50:28","modified_gmt":"2023-01-13T23:50:28","slug":"im-not-doing-anything-else-that-is-hard-done-with-the-hard-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/im-not-doing-anything-else-that-is-hard-done-with-the-hard-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m not doing anything else that is HARD…done with the HARD STUFF!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I made a declaration on Tuesday morning, during incredible physical pain from new formed gallstones, that I’m DONE with hard things. I am not doing anything else that is hard for at least 6 months. I am only doing things, experiencing people, feeling emotions, sharing words, and listening in ways that are easy for me and bring me joy. Loved Ones, this may sound ridiculous and totally impossible to you but, in that moment, I meant it (and I still sort of mean it). So, as I sat in my bed, surrounded by things that make me happy, I glanced at the books stacked on my nightstand, and quickly determined that the readings this week fall in the category of \u201chard things\u2019. Not because I don\u2019t have the ability to comprehend them but because the actual act of picking them up, cracking the spine and going through the pages and dog-earing (yes, I still use this as an effective method of reminding me to go back) pages was more than I had the energy to do therefore solidly placing it in the \u201chard things\u201d category. \u00a0But as a true Enneagram 8, my need to be assertive took over. I tried to ignore the stack of books, but the presence of the stack of books and the impeding deadline to write this week\u2019s post, seemed to challenge me. The typical mantras were in my head, \u201cBeautiful Girl, You Can Do Hard Things!\u201d, \u201cShe Believed She Could, So She Did!\u201d, \u201cYour Mountain Is Waiting to Be Climbed, Be on Your Way!\u201d. \u00a0I acknowledge that this feeling of being challenged by the books and the mantras on repeat in my head could all be characteristics of being an Enneagram 8 or it could have simply been the effects of the very powerful pain meds in my system, whatever it was I picked up the first book and decided to do at least one more \u201chard thing\u201d, I began reading. <\/span><\/p>\n

I love reading and writing, they bring me joy. However, I like to have a great deal of control over what I read and what I chose to write about. I had low expectations for How to Read a Book, <\/em>by Adler and Van Doren. I mean, how helpful could it be? It\u2019s a book that I have been assigned to read to tell me how to read a book\u2026really?!?! As I pressed on, I\u2019ll admit that the light bulb went off in my brain when I began to understand that Inspectional Reading is the absolute cure for me reading things that I have not chosen for myself. It is the key to doing the most pressing \u201chard thing\u201d, reading three books in two days. So, when I read, \u201cOur point is really very simple. Many books are hardly worth even skimming; some should be read quickly; and few should be read at a rate, usually quite slow, that allows for complete comprehension. It is wasteful to read a book slowly that deserves only a fast reading;\u201d[1]<\/a>, it transformed the way I approached the rest of Adler\u2019s book, and the two other books assigned this week. As I inspectionally read How to Take Smart Notes<\/em> I quickly discovered that my note taking skills have not been effective. I have a collection of post-it notes with phrases like, \u201cyou should explore this further\u201d, \u201cthis seems integral to the topic\u201d, \u201cyes, this is exactly the direction I want to go\u201d! They are all over my office with no real connection to the source. My system is awful! \u00a0It was truly liberating to read Ahrens account of Niklas Luhmann\u2019s Slip-Box process, he states, \u201cRarely would a note stay in isolation. He did not just copy ideas or quotes from the texts he read, but made a transition from one context to another.\u201d[2]<\/a> Looking around at all my post-it notes, slips of paper and books with multiple dog-eared pages it is clear that I have more work to do and that my declaration to not do anything else that is hard can only come true if I commit to a system that allows me to work more effective. Things are really only as hard as you make them!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Mortimer Jerome Adler and Van Charles Doren, in How to Read a Book<\/em> (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 39.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> S\u00f6nke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking<\/em> (Hamburg, Germany: So\u0308nke Ahrens, 2022), 18.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I made a declaration on Tuesday morning, during incredible physical pain from new formed gallstones, that I’m DONE with hard things. I am not doing anything else that is hard for at least 6 months. I am only doing things, experiencing people, feeling emotions, sharing words, and listening in ways that are easy for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":174,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2513,2489,660,2326],"class_list":["post-30133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alovesandwich","tag-dlgp02","tag-adler","tag-ahrens","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/174"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30134,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30133\/revisions\/30134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}