Two ways to grow

 

a picture of the harbor from the place we stay in Michigan 

From James Clear:

There are two ways to grow: by adding or by shedding.

Do you need to add something or do you need to shed something?

And sometimes we need to shed things in order to realize what we need keep and shed.  I was chatting with Chris Cirrincione at work on Friday after school.  We were talking about how we felt we were chasing out tails (or someone else's tails) all of this last semester: board reports, new initiatives, new tasks (that always involved a whole project of reaching out to the teachers in the department and recording and reporting out).  I had "there are opportunity costs to doing all of this tail chasing."  Chris agreed, naming our planned (and mostly abandoned) focus on a school-wide ACT-improvement plan or on continuing to learn about assessment literacy with a consultant we hired Tony Reibel, also, just partially followed-up on.  It would be exhausting to list all of the new add-on responsibilities that have been added to our plates.  

What Clear's idea suggests is not only this truth about opportunities lost, but also casts it in another light:  we can GROW by shedding.  

It's easy to think about growing by adding: I starting running more, meditating more, reading more books, writing a haiku per day.  It's harder to think about not just "things that I stopped doing" which is my normal way of reflecting, or to think about "let's stop doing that thing because it's not doing what we thought it would,"*. but naming how "shedding" can lead to growing.  

Here's some shedding that can lead to growing:

• the obvious way: it creates more time, space, and mental energy for things that really do matter
• stop watching the nightly news bc it's all horrible and literally depressing
• stop fading off at the end of the night scrolling thru social media 
• kill the TV... the ads are toxic to your peace... they invade your brain space
• unsubscribe to everything that interrupts you and makes you respond -- texts, emails, notifications
• (this is about health of the body, not the mind, but related) shed habits of drinking, eating mindlessly, candy, soda pop)
• the insect or snake sheds its skin so that it can literally grow
• (what does it mean to grow for a human, if not in pounds - wisdom, peace, equanimity, social contacts, responsibility, technical ability (from hammering to ear training))
• you run faster when you shed pounds (you grow in fastness)
• shed a false front to become more authentic
• shed a dogma (a set of interpretive schemes)
• shed a thousand piles of old teaching and DC material to simply navigate
• Kim shares: "controlled burns". I say molting and dispensing seeds. 
• (thinking about Kant - what is enlightenment right now) Goethe?

*this is related to Clear's ideas like "things you'll never regret doing" or "20 micro habits to improve your life"

J and I had another nice break in a small harbor town in Michigan, kept inside by the howling winds and cold.  There was a lot of time to think and reflect.