{"id":240,"date":"2008-10-14T12:01:21","date_gmt":"2008-10-14T16:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/14\/what-is-it-youre-trying-to-do\/"},"modified":"2008-10-14T12:01:21","modified_gmt":"2008-10-14T16:01:21","slug":"what-is-it-youre-trying-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/14\/what-is-it-youre-trying-to-do\/","title":{"rendered":"What is it you&#8217;re trying to do?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a few sticky notes around my monitor to help me stay focused when I&#8217;m writing essays for school.  One of these says, <strong>&#8220;Why is this important?&#8221;  <\/strong>It reminds me that every bit of information I include in a paper needs to be relevant to the thesis.  It helps me cut down a long paper or focus a paper that&#8217;s wandering. <\/p>\n<p>I just added another one and realized that I can apply it to life, not just to writing.  This one says,<strong> &#8220;What is it you&#8217;re trying to do?&#8221;<\/strong>  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m finding that I&#8217;m trying to take more of a position in my work this semester. I&#8217;m trying to be less neutral about what I read and how I respond and it&#8217;s been difficult.  I feel like I can sort out an author&#8217;s argument but I hesitate to judge it.  At some point I have to make this leap and determine if I agree &#8212; not just question if the author has argued well, or justified their claim sufficiently.<\/p>\n<p>But beyond school assignments, I&#8217;m nearing another crossroads and wondering where I&#8217;m going to turn next.  <strong>&#8220;What is it you&#8217;re trying to do&#8221;<\/strong> suggests we need to evaluate what our choices mean.  If I keep heading down a path of post secondary education, whether that&#8217;s in history or another discipline, eventually that&#8217;s going to lead me somewhere&#8230;but is that where I want to go? What is it I&#8217;m trying to do?  If I leave academia that will open and close other opportunities.<em>  What is it I&#8217;m trying to do?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I think the same applies to parenting, gardening, cleaning the house, relationships and more.  What is it you&#8217;re trying to do? What is it you do each day and do these things point to the same goal?  I don&#8217;t really know that I&#8217;ve been concrete about having goals but it&#8217;s come to my attention that it&#8217;s time to attend to this part of my life.  <\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s about conscious living.  Making choices because it&#8217;s what we want, it&#8217;s the road we want, not because it&#8217;s the easiest one, the one we &#8220;should&#8221; take, or the one directly in front of us.  Eventually we will arrive somewhere and if we haven&#8217;t given any thought to where we want to be, we may find that getting on track will require some heavy duty detouring.  Or we may find that we&#8217;ve made a big mess of things.  Either way, I&#8217;ve got to pay more attention to the little things as part of a bigger picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a few sticky notes around my monitor to help me stay focused when I&#8217;m writing essays for school. One of these says, &#8220;Why is this important?&#8221; It reminds me that every bit of information I include in a paper needs to be relevant to the thesis. It helps me cut down a long [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,25,39,37,40],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}