Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [66]
REFLECTING ON YOUR OBSERVATIONS
Observation will sometimes, by itself, bring valuable insights. But you can increase the number and quality of your insights by developing the habit of reflecting on your observations. The best way to do this is to set aside a special time every day – early in the morning, perhaps, or late in the evening (but not when you are exhausted). It needn't be long; ten or fifteen minutes may be enough. But be sure you are free of distractions. Review what you have seen and heard during the past twenty-four hours. Ask yourself what it means, how it relates to other important matters, and how you can use it to improve yourself or to spur achievement.
Let's say that you heard this proverb earlier today: "To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible." Reflecting on it might lead you to the conclusion that popular culture's emphasis on possessing things – new cars, stylish clothes, and so on – is a false value, that material wealth can never guarantee happiness.
Or you may have read the news that a Michigan court ruled that a fetus may be considered a person in a wrongful death lawsuit. A man's wife and sixteen-week-old fetus were killed after she swerved her car to avoid hitting an unleashed dog. The man sued the dog's owners. (This decision departed from previous court rulings in Michigan that a fetus is not a person until it can survive outside the uterus.)4 Here your reflection might lead you to consider the implications of this ruling for the issue of abortion.
APPLICATIONS
Select a place where you can observe other people as suggested in this chapter. The campus snack bar, for example, or a dormitory lounge. Go there and stay at least half an hour. Try to notice more than the obvious. Look for subtleties, things you'd normally miss. Take notes on what you observe.
As you instructor in this course or one of your other courses for permission to visit another of his or her sections. Go to that class and observe carefully the reactions of individual students – for example, the subtle indications they give of attention or inattention. Take notes.
Make yourself look as sloppy and scruffy as you can. Put on old, wrinkled clothes. Mess up your hair. Rub dirt on your face and arms. Then go into a store and ask a clerk for assistance. Speak to other customers. Check the clerk's reaction to you and the reactions of other customers. A day or so later return to the same store looking your very neatest and cleanest. Speak and act in the same manner. Note people's reactions. Compare them with those you got the first time.
How mannerly are the students, faculty, and staff at your college? To answer this question, observe their behavior in various campus situations, noting examples of courtesy and rudeness.
Many people have become so accustomed to advertisements that they no longer examine them carefully and critically. Look closely at the advertising you encounter in a typical day in newspapers and magazines, on television, and elsewhere. Determine what appeals are used to elicit a favorable response from you and how much specific information about the products or services is presented in the advertisements. Record your observations.
Practice reflecting, as explained in this chapter, on the following quotations:
If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?
Rabbi Hillel
Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.
Thomas Fuller
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier
You cannot really love God unless you love your neighbor.
Anonymous
Apply your critical thinking to each of the following issues. Make a special effort to recall situations you have observed