I have to say, it’s a bit anti-climatic to spend years thinking about donating your organs and spending only two and a half minutes actually signing up to do so. A couple of clicks and filling in one online form available on the BC Transplant Society website later, I am, to all intents and purposes, an organ donor!
(Well, as soon as they send me my confirmation email and I verify myself on the registry, anyway.)
So for those of you who’d like to donate, but think you need lots of time to sit down and fill it all in correctly — you really don’t. Just three minutes, including time spent getting your CareCard ready.
Live Life. Pass It On. (From BC Transplant Society. Credit: Eva Markvoort and Cyrus McEarchern.)
I decided to donate my organs a few years ago, but put off signing up until I had a conversation with my parents about my intentions. Because, although it’s not legally required to get consent from your next of kin, I thought my family had the right to have this discussion. Would it potentially upset them? Given that my family is everything from agnostic to atheist to pragmatic believers, but not practitioners, in some, but not all, traditional Chinese beliefs, throw in a healthy amount of Buddhist philosophy, a diluted dose of Christianity, and a minuscule smidgeon of Jewish heritage that no one (except myself) actually seems to pay any attention to — I had absolutely no idea how they would react to this particular announcement.
They weren’t at all upset.
It turns out, when I visited them this time around and asked, that my mother is adamantly against my donating blood and totally cool with donating organs. Her philosophy is that one might make me dead and the other, I already am so it doesn’t matter. Which is not really the kind of catchy phrase that one gleans from either Blood Services or the Transplant Society’s campaigns; I think, perhaps, that she might be thinking of the increase in AIDS in China in the 1990s when there was a sharp increase in HIV-positive cases due to infection through blood donation (or blood selling, as it really was at that time). Or perhaps she’s remembering the number of times I’ve suffered from low blood sugar in the last several years and how she doesn’t want me fainting on her hands again. Either way, we didn’t bother talking much about donating blood since I’m not eligible to do that anyhow.
Speaking of blood donations, did you know that if you can’t donate blood for transfusions, you might be able to donate to research instead? That’s for all you travellers who’ve been to malaria-infested places and the like. How exciting! (Can we tell that I want to donate blood, too? Maybe in another several years.)
I know who’s there; I’ve looked through the peephole. But I don’t open the door, because I’m busy with exams and papers, and they should know that. They can hear me rattling away in here, with the occasional wail of ‘I’m so tired!’ At times like that, they leave me in peace — but they don’t go, oh no. They’re sitting right there on the doorstep of my mind, waiting for moments like these when it’s temporarily quiet within, and then the knocking begins again.
It’s not that I don’t want to let these thoughts in — I do. I want to give each and every one of them the time and attention they deserve, as a proper hostess should, but I’m afraid I haven’t got enough to spare, not for all of them at once.
I’m afraid opening the door a crack will let the whole lot in, and that’ll be the end of my GPA as I know it.
(I’d really like to know when I started caring about my GPA so much. It’s not as if it reciprocates.)
But my visitors are accumulating and I think I should let one of them in. Just one, for now. Maybe if they know that each of them will enter in time, they won’t try to ram the door?
My first guest brings with her a smile and a memory that has me smiling away, too, at least at first:
About a month ago, I was sitting in one of my classes just loving the lecture that was happening before me. I was so very pleased with myself for taking this class to begin with; it was exactly what I’ve wanted for four years.
For four years. Isn’t that a long time to wait? something whispered inside me.
And that quickly, I couldn’t let go of the thought: I could have spent the last four years doing the things I really care about.
Let me throw in a couple of caveats here to explain what I mean: my life is not one long story of doing things I don’t care about. As a general rule, my UBC experiences and my degree are in areas I love. There are plenty of things I wouldn’t change, and I think one day I’ll have to write it all out, to explain the other side of the story, of why I did what I did.
But this side of the story is the one that says why I didn’t do the things I care about. This isn’t a matter of ‘I wish I’d found this sooner’, which depends on luck, but a matter of not doing the things I knew I cared about all along. Oh, I had my reasons. We all have our reasons. Sometimes these are legitimate, like financial, y’know. When we get right down to it, though, mine were all to do with fear: with being too afraid of potential failure to dare to try.
What did I really have to lose, though? Watching my dreams crash and burn, I suppose. No one voluntarily signs up for that. Except I have now lost four years’ worth of time I could have spent working hard at what I like doing, at building up my own skills, at really changing and improving and shaping myself to be what I wanted to be. And while just trying your best doesn’t always mean that things work out, I’m now feeling the edge of the cliche (or rather, its absence), of being able to say, ‘At least I tried.’
This kind of miserable thought triggers other miserable ones, such as thinking of all the things I haven’t done in the past few years that I was so intent upon in my first eager, hopeful year:
I haven’t written or painted or played the piano nearly as much as I wanted to — heck, I haven’t touched a paintbrush in almost six years, even though this was one of the things that made me deeply happy once upon a time.
I haven’t explored Vancouver nearly as much as I wanted to, despite my best intentions.
I haven’t gone dancing.
I haven’t gone to poetry slams at Cafe Deux Soleils.
I’ve yet to make a trip to the UBC Farmers’ Market in the summer.
I haven’t walked along the beach, haven’t gone biking frequently, haven’t gone swimming, haven’t sat and read on Granville Island, just listening to the music, all summer long.
I haven’t read all the books accumulating on my shelves.
I haven’t become an amazing cook or baker; I still don’t know how to make my mother’s dumplings.
I haven’t been brave, haven’t taken risks or pushed myself out of my comfort zone nearly enough times to even register on my mental radar.
I haven’t become the person that I wanted to be by the time I’m 21. I’m not even 21 anymore.
This isn’t generally an exercise I encourage anyone to do, by the way. It makes you sad. But I really wish I had thought a little more about what I wanted to achieve while I was in university before I got here — not a detailed list to follow stubbornly, because that doesn’t allow for the change that inevitably happens, but some general articulation of what I would like.
I’ve thought about making this list for the time I hit my next milestone age of 30, but that’s a whole lot trickier… How do I plan things that I want, like a family and a career, when one is not entirely within my control and I don’t even know what I want the other to look like?
The older I get, the younger and less sure of myself I feel. All the clear-cut plans I had in first year have dissipated and I’m now evasive when asked what I want to do. I don’t know what I want to do.
Or how. How will I combine and/or balance what I want with what I need? How do I pay my rent and feed myself and buy some new clothes to replace the ones I’m always mending now, and still be happy doing what I do? Aren’t these the questions facing most graduates, anyway?
I still want to do that list of things I haven’t done, to feel a little less bad about myself a year from now, when I’ll be graduating and there really won’t be another chance to change my Vancouver story.
I also want to not be thirty years old and looking back at the last decade of my life, wishing I’d taken the risk to do the things I care about, after all.
Usually, I’m the type of person who can remember all the tasks she has to do by when without having to write them down. I have a list of homework and when they are due in my weekly planner which I refer to once in a while, just in case, but it’s usually not necessary.
Lately, however, this ever-growing to do list has got to the point where I can’t process it all anymore, and I’ve started to plan my weeks out using a weekly planner template taken from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Sean Covey, and put together by Ammon, the owner of the blog I originally found the PDF on.
Those of you who’ve read The 7 Habits will be familiar with this layout, but in case you aren’t, here is how I use it:
1. Identify your roles in life
Typical roles include one’s role as a spouse, parent, student, worker, etc. My roles are those of a daughter, sister, friend, student, employee, and Speakeasy team leader. Depending on the week, I fill out these roles a little differently: this week, for example, each of my classes gets its own arrow, I am a team leader, and I have an arrow for myself.
I like to colour code each of my roles to make it easier to see across the page, as well.
2. Identify the weekly goals you want to achieve for each role
Break down what you want to achieve in each aspect or role of your life. For example, this week my chart looks like this:
FNSP: readings, journal entry, research paper sources
TL: get materials for year-end event, do budget before April 5
When I’m done with my list, I like to number each of them off to make it easier for the next step.
3. Fill out each of these goals across the week for when you want to do them
Decide when you need to do each of these goals. I like to put these in both ‘Today’s Priorities’ and at the exact time I want to do them, if possible, e.g. my priority tomorrow is to complete my journal entry for my FNSP class and I want to do that at 4 pm, after I finish work and pick up some materials for the year-end event.
I also fill out other things across my ‘Appointments/Commitments’ timetable that aren’t necessarily in my goals list in terms of my different roles, but which I need or want to do for one reason or another, such as laundry, groceries, cleaning the bathroom, etc.
The evening/notes section is usually full of reminders to myself of things I need to do at some point, e.g. pick up newspaper to clean bathroom mirror.
What’s this ‘Sharpen the Saw’ business?
Sharpen the Saw is a reference to Habit 7 of The 7 Habits (which I do recommend reading for its many useful and important ideas, not least on time management and interpersonal communication), which is about taking the time to maintain one’s physical, mental, spiritual and social/emotional well-being in order to be at your best.
To be honest, I’m not filling this section out at all at the moment. A need to engage in more self-care? Probably, but I am also at my limit this week in terms of what I can do for myself while completing everything else I have to do… so while it’s not ideal, self-care is taking a bit of a backseat again this week. But it’s okay, I tell myself, just one more week of pulling through and I’ll be able to breathe a little more next Sunday.
Just a little more.
In terms of how well this works for me
I’ll be honest, I didn’t finish everything I wrote down for last week, and there were days when I didn’t do what I needed to do and had to catch up other days in other ways (read: less sleep). But I did manage to complete three quarters of what I originally set out, which is more than I would probably have achieved had I not written it all out. So that’s something.
My biggest problem with this method is that I end up feeling very stressed at the beginning of each week as I look in despair at the schedule I’ve made for myself and calming down as I slog through the days — which may not be so much an issue with time management as it is with my stress management.
Regardless, I’d like to hear how other people manage their time, should there be something better suited to me floating around out there.
And now I am off to lose more sleep. It is sad when you can’t even catch up on sleep over the weekend.
On an unrelated note, I’m reading Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’ over and over again. It’s my mental breathing space.
Let’s see… in all the years I’ve been at UBC, what have I done with my Reading Breaks?
2008: Participated in the UBC Learning Exchange Reading Week Project, which I highly recommend doing at least once in your time here.
2009: Jet-set across Canada to visit my UofT friends. I think we actually did study together one day of that week, so that counts as having done my reading, no?
2010, AKA the two-week Olympics break: Flew to New York for the first week to visit my friend there and came back the second week with the intention of getting all my homework done, but not doing any of it at all. I think I was watching the Olympics and just lazing about. I really should have just stayed in New York that second week as well.
2011: Went skiing for the first weekend (which doesn’t really count as Reading Week), went to work for the first half of the week, and developed mysterious food allergies in the second half of the week. My hives were horrendous, and neither the doctor nor I have any clue what could be causing them, since I haven’t done or eaten anything new. Am currently on antihistamines that are the equivalent of sleeping pills, my friends tell me. I’ve been trying valiantly to do some of my readings, but I can’t honestly tell you how effective this is.
Lesson learned (all too late)? Just take a break from school and don’t give myself the extra guilt of ‘I should be doing reading’. Old habits die hard; it’ll never happen. Clearly the hives are Nature’s way of enforcing this ban on reading upon me.
(In other news, I just started a new blog keeping track of a whole other kind of reading.)
As usual, the UBC Student Leadership Conference was a great start to the term. Drew Dudley was amazing. The Buried Life boys were cool. If there were a few pieces of advice I would give to new students, one of them would be to go to the SLC at least once during your time here. Like many things in life, you simply don’t know if you’ll like something or not until you give it a go. So give it a go.
I trust that my fellow bloggers over on the UBC Blog Squad will give a much fuller and more exciting account of their experiences on Saturday, so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to share what I have actually been rethinking, as a result of the SLC, and also of my own thinking over the last several months:
Significance.
Let’s think of it in terms of leadership first, because that’s what the conference was about anyway. The conference which I’d faithfully attended for three years and was seriously considering not attending for a fourth.
You see, in third year the question I asked myself had changed from ‘What can I do on this campus?’ to ‘What have I done?’ I wasn’t really happy with the answers. In fourth year, the question has become even more pressing, and I felt even more dissatisfied, particularly when I compared myself to the many high-achieving students that I know and hang around — you know the kind, the ones who seem to do everything, and everything well. Many of these truly admirable, wonderful human beings were presenters and facilitators at the SLC this year — and part of me didn’t want to go because I was afraid of thinking, all the time I was there, how much they were giving and how much I was not. It took some encouragement on the part of one of the SLC Faces of Today (who didn’t know what I was thinking, bless their heart) for me to sign up, but I was still nervous about feeling lousy.
Until I got an email about opening keynote Drew Dudley, and I knew it was going to be a good conference.
His story hits home for me because it clarifies something I’ve been wanting — and struggling — to believe: that the small things matter.
As Drew so eloquently pointed out, we’ve made leadership into something bigger than us, a title that has to be given to us by other people. We think we can only be significant when we’ve made big changes, so most of us go about thinking that we’re not significant, because we’re not among the exceptional 10%. We’re so used to considering that topmost tier as the standard of excellence that we fail to acknowledge the hugely significant groundwork that’s been covered by the other 90%.
And yet what we do everyday is perhaps what leaves the greatest impact for all of us — including that top 10% — because they are so daily.
The Buried Life guys were lovely, but they didn’t affect me as much because I already have lists (e.g. Day Zero) that ask me what I want to achieve by certain set dates, rather than my death-day. It’s never a question of what I want to do before I die — because frankly, I could die at any time — but how I want to do it all. How do I want to live my life?
A couple of months ago, an old classmate from my primary through secondary schools died after a decade-long battle with cancer.
Over the winter break, one of our volunteers also passed away.
I don’t really know about their other commitments and achievements, but I do know that they were both exceptional in the lives of their families and friends. Their love and kindness mattered. They were significant in the gentlenesses they exhibited and the sincerity and enthusiasm with which they approached their lives. They were important.
For most of my life, I thought I had to do everything in order to get the upper edge on someone else in university, job or other applications. I was inspired by the sheer number of meaningful activities that the student leaders who mentored me in my first and second years here could do, and told myself I had to be like them before I could think of myself as significant. I’ve made my resumé as jam-packed and high-achieving as many other people do (particularly in my first two years here) — yet I’m not feeling any more significant than when I started at UBC. I still worry that I’m not competitive enough.
And there are an extraordinary number of people who manage to achieve extraordinary things in their limited time. It’s a little impossible to hear the sheer number of activities with which the SLC Faces of Today and the Nestor Korchinsky nominees are involved and not feel overwhelmed and admiring. They deserve to be recognised for what they do.
Not everyone can be like them, however — and the rest of us end up despairing, because we don’t know how we’re going to stand out in what sometimes feels like an ocean of exceptionality.
I’ve got a theory I’m going to test, though: be passionate.
Some people do things just to put on their resumés. They don’t really care. I can tell you that at Speakeasy, we don’t want that kind of people, and if we, a volunteer organisation, can afford to look for the people who want to be here, then it stands to reason that larger organisations which are going to pay you will ask for the same. Caring about what you do will make you significant.
I’m not saying you don’t need skills and qualifications to succeed — obviously you do. What I’m saying is to get the skills and education you need and get involved in the things that matter to you. This last clause is important, because there are plenty of people with skills, but a shortage of people with passion. Find what you like, and do it well, because when you really care, you make a difference. Passion is one of those things that is hard to fake; we can tell when someone genuinely believes in what they’re doing, because it lights them up and changes their whole being.
Doing twenty things at once is surely impressive, but doing a few things you are truly passionate about will also make you stand out.
Doing what you care about is also what will stand out to you when you look back on this period in your life. I’ve been reflecting a lot on the things I’ve been involved in, many of which I’ve enjoyed, but few with as much dedication as I devote to Speakeasy. I want more of that — more times when I feel like I’m committing myself to something I really believe in, more certainty that I am giving something back to the community.
Finally, I’ve decided to stop moping about what I haven’t achieved and focus on what I can still do in my time here. I want to be significant and do the things I care about, to have the courage to follow my dreams (the ones I hide under my bed because I’m too afraid to tell people about them).
More importantly, I want to be significant to the people around me, on a daily basis. Because I’ve decided that if I change the world in some large way yet neglect the people around me, I will feel like I’ve failed somehow. Even if I don’t change the world, however, as long as I feel like I’ve been important to the people around me everyday, I will be okay with that.
Lillienne