This year has turned out to be a year of tremendous challenge for me. I realized that the career I’d spent my adult life cultivating was not quite as fulfilling as I’d hoped, and at the same time my relationship started buckling under pressures both from within and without.
Change, it seems, was in order.
If you listen to popular wisdom, especially as expressed in movies and TV shows, profound change comes from profound events. The alcoholic hits rock bottom, losing his family, his job, and his dignity before he can start to address his addiction. The surgeon loses a patient on the operating table before she can grapple with her insecurities. The playboy millionaire discovers he has a teenage daughter before he can learn to take responsibility for his life.
And on and on.
The reality, though, is somewhat different. While some people face life-changing events, most of what defines and redefines us as people is not the stuff of big-budget epic movies, but rather the boring, mundane stuff of everyday life. For me, it wasn’t infidelity — mine or hers – or drug abuse or the death of a parent that turned my relationship towards rocky waters, it was… dishes. And it wasn’t a psychotic student dissatisfied with his grade stalking me across the quad or the loss of three years of research data that led me to realize I was spinning my wheels as an academic, it was… grading papers.
I kept forgetting to do the dishes when it was my turn, and I started facing my students’ ungraded essays with dread, procrastinating as long as I could.
Those little things – a household complaint heard in millions of homes around the world, and an educational chore despised in faculty lounges throughout the universe – said a lot more about me, and about the choices I had made and was making in my life, than any sexual fling, drinking binge, or expensive hobby could have.
How can we grab hold of those little things that say so much about who we are – and use them to move us closer to who we want to be? To do so, we first have to identify them, to pick them out of the flow of daily life for closer examination. Then, we have to figure out what they mean, what those actions and practices say about us, and how well they jibe with who we want to be. Finally, we have to commit to a course of action that changes or eliminates behaviors that don’t reflect our better selves, replacing them with more positive ones. In short, we have to go through an ongoing process of:
- Discovery,
- Analysis, and
- Intention.
Discovery
The key to change in your life – and really, the key to satisfaction as well – is self-knowledge. In our go-go-go society, there’s often little time for self-reflection, which can blind us to most of the little things that go into making our big lives. Not to mention that the things that are most a part of us become practically invisible.
Hence, discovery. Whether it’s part of your weekly routine or a nightly ritual, take some time to go over and record the moments that reflect problems you’re dealing with, as well as the moments that are typically “you”. You might start keeping a “discovery journal”, someplace to record the problems that arise over the course of each day – and the little successes, too. Though I’m focusing on change here, it’s never a bad idea to recognize and embrace the positive, too.
While some things will jump out at you, the point of the discovery process isn’t to delve into the deeper meanings of anything, not just yet. Rather the idea is to see patterns emerge. These patterns will be the grist for your analytical mill in the next stage.
Analysis
Once you’ve given yourself a good looking-into, it’s time to figure out what to do about it. I’ve already mentioned patterns – are there mistakes you make over and over? Arguments you get into again and again? Recurring moments when you do that “laying out your excuse in your head even through nobody asked you to explain yourself” thing?
Try to distance yourself from your actions a little. Look at your inventory of “totally you” moments – what do they say about who you are? Imagine someone you dislike doing the same things; what would you think about those behaviors then? Who do your actions suggest that you are?
Now, who do you want to be? What’s meaningful for you, what values do you want to realize in your daily life? In my case, I consider myself a sensitive and committed partner who does his part in the home – and as a gender studies professor, it’s also important to me that I not fall into gender-stereotyped roles. By repeatedly forgetting about the dishes, I was making more work for my partner – and worse, it was work that men typically shun as “women’s work”. More than that, though, I was failing to do my part in the running of our household, which implied that maybe it wasn’t my first priority. Since I wasn’t doing more important stuff instead of the dishes, I had to face a real disjoint between the person I wanted to be and the person I was showing myself to be.
Intention
At this point, it’s time to think about change: what do you intend to do about all this? The trick here is to be positive, not negative. Not only do negative resolutions lack emotional power, the power that keeps us motivated, but they’re really hard to keep a strong hold on. “Not doing” leaves less of a trace, less evidence, than “doing”.
If you really want to put a positive shine on your new commitments, you can phrase them as affirmations. Not just “I will do the dishes every night, even when it’s not my turn, because that’s one way I participate in my family” but something like “I celebrate my responsibilities through which I express my love for my family.” That’s not really my style, so the first version was closer to the commitment I made – and for the next several months, I became a dish-doing machine, and you know what? It wasn’t a chore at all, it was a pleasure, because it was one way I made the lives of the people I care most about run smoothly.
It’s important the you find the motivation and intention within yourself if you’re to make real change that sticks. Doing things because you know others think they’re what you should do, or worse, to “show them”, might get a short-term shift out of you, but over the long term isn’t likely to be very satisfying – or self-sustaining. In the end, you can’t make others the gauge by which you measure yourself.
Personal change is hard, and harder still because there’s so much little stuff going on in our lives that all push and pull us in different directions. Which is precisely why it’s so important to pay attention to the little things, no matter how trivial they might seem – those are the things that throw us for a loop, the things that slip by invisibly until suddenly we find we’re not very happy with our lives. I’ve been at it for months now, and to be honest, the end isn’t in sight ( I am, after all, changing careers as well as trying to patch back together a relationship). But in the end, it’s worth it, because I’ve taken charge of so many parts of my life that I was content, once upon a time, to let slide.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
译文:
留心小事
今年对我而言是充满重大挑战的一年。我发现（尽管）我穷尽青春投入的这份工作并不像预期的那样令人满意，但与此同时我（与外界）的关系却在来自内忧外患压力下开始崩盘。
看来，是该改变了。
如果你有接收流行文化，尤其是电影和电视节目里的那些，（你就会发现）深刻的改变往往来自具有深远意义的事。在酒鬼开始戒除酒瘾之前，他已经到了人生的最低点，失去家庭，工作以及自尊。在外科医生克服不安全感前，他已经在手术台上使病患丧命。在一个玩世不恭的百万富翁学会对自己的人生负责之前，他发现自己竟已有了个13，4岁的女儿。
如此，不停往复。
然而，现实有些许不同。当有些人面临着足以改变命运的事时，（就会发现，）大部分的那些能规定或重新定义我们生活的事并不是大型史诗电影里的那一些，而是单调又平凡的日常琐事。对我来说，使我的人际关系变得摇摆不定的并不是我或是我妻子发生不忠，也不是滥用药物，病人的死亡，而是...碗碟。并不是有患精神病的学生因为对成绩不满意而沿着院子跟踪我或是因为丢失了三年的调查数据，导致我作为一个大学教师做的只是琐事, 我所指的是...批改试卷。
我总是在轮到我洗碗碟时忘记这件事，每当我充满忧虑地要开始面对还没有批改过的学生作文时，我总是设法拖延。
那些会泄露我许多秘密，涉及我人生中已经做了和正在做的选择的事，并不是两性情欲，饮酒作乐，或是奢侈的爱好，而是那些小事——那些你会在世界上数百万个家庭里听到的家庭抱怨，那些在空中回荡着的对教师所做的琐事的鄙视。
我们怎样才能控制这些会泄露我们太多秘密的小事呢？—我们又该如何利用它们使自己与理想中的目标更接近呢？要做到这一点，我们首先要把它们找出来，从日常生活的种种中搜寻出来以备进一步的调查。接着，我们必须发现它们的意义，这些行为和动作透露了我们哪些情况，它们又和我们理想的目标差距有多少。最后，对于那些不能表现出最佳自己的行为，我们必须实施一系列措施加以改正或消灭，并用更积极地行为取代它们。简而言之，我们必须经历一个循序渐进的过程：
1 发现
2 分析, 以及
3 目标
发现
改变生活的关键——实际上，也是获得满足的关键——那就是自我了解。在这个快节奏的社会，我们总是几乎没有时间自省，这使得我们对大部分的小事都视而不见，而这些事却对我们的生活有重要作用。就更不用提那些我们中的大部分人事实上无法看见的事了。
因此，去学会发现。不论它是你每周的例行公事还是每晚的老规矩，花些时间温故，记录于那些能反映你所面对着的问题的时刻，以及那些能反映真实的“你”的时刻。你可能开始保有一份“发现日志”，记录着每天生活中产生的问题，以及小成功。虽然我在这儿关注的是变化，但是发掘并接受积极的方面也不失为个好主意。
尽管有些事会跳脱你的掌握，但发现这个过程的终点并不是在于深入探究任何事的意义，（因为）现在还没到时候，而是观察（行为）模式的产生。而这些模式会成为你下个阶段供分析之用的食粮。
分析
当你彻底地对自己检查一番后，就是你捉摸对此如何着手的时候了。我已经提到过行为模式——那些是你反复会犯的错误吗？ 是你会一而再再而三参与的争吵吗？ 是那些反复出现“没人要求你解释，你却已经在脑子里想好借口”的情况的时刻吗？
试着让你自己与行为（模式）保持距离。看一下反映出“不折不扣的你”的那些时刻的目录——从它们那儿反映出的你是怎样一个人？想象一下你不喜欢的某个人做相同的事：那样的话你对那些行为有什么看法呢？那些举动暗示出你是怎样一个人呢？
现在，你想要成为谁？ 对你来说什么是有意义的，在你的日常生活中你想实现哪些价值？ 以我为例，我把自己看成是一个心思细密，忠诚无比的伙伴，在家庭中克尽职守——而作为一个性研究教授，而我而言，重要的是不要跌入老一套的性别角色中。反复忘记洗碗，我（实际）是在给我的妻子制造更多的工作——更坏的是，这是男人们通常以“女人们的活儿”为由规避的工作。更严重的是，我在家庭事务的运行过程中没有做好我的这一份，它可能暗示出我没有把它放在最优先考虑的事上。由于我没有在洗碗碟之外之外做更重要的事来代替它，我必须面对理想中的我和真实表现出的我的脱节。
目标
在这个时刻，是时候考虑改变了：对这一切你打算去做些什么？ 这里要采取的方法应该是积极的作为，而不是消极的不作为。不只是因为消极的解决方法缺乏感情上的力量，这种力量使我们保持动力，更因为它们确实很难保持坚定不衰。“不去做”比起“去做”少了追溯的痕迹和证据。
如果你确实想要让你的新承诺有个积极的闪光点，你要把自己的主张写成警句。不是“即使没轮到我，我也会每晚洗碗碟，因为这是我参与家庭生活的方法”而是“我承担责任从而表达对家庭的热爱。”这不是我的风格，所以我的第一个版本和我所做的承诺很接近—在接下来的几个月中，我成了一台洗碗机，你知道吗？事实上这不是杂务，而是乐趣，因为这是我所能做的让我在乎的人生活舒适的方法。
如果你打算有真正意义上的改变，那找到你自己的动力和目标很重要。因为，当你知道这是别人所认为的你应该做的事，或是更糟糕的，当你为了“展示给别人看”而去做事，可能会让你产生短时间的改变，但是（它导致的）她长时间的结果不可能使人很满意或是使人自立。最后，通过你自己的估计，你无法达到别人的要求。
个人的改变是越来越困难的，因为在我们的生活中有太多东西把我们朝不同的方向推来拉去。简而言之，为什么说不管事情看上去多微不足道，都值得关注是因为——它们把我们投入一个圈子中，使人看不见它们就滑开了，直到突然之间我们发现自己对生活不再满意。我现在已经持续这个计划有几个月了，老实说，终点遥遥无期（毕竟，我正在改变工作，也在修补我的人际关系）。但是，当我达到目标时，一切都是值得的，因为我已经能把握我生活中的许多事，这生活使我满意，曾经却（悄悄）溜走。
DDustin M. Wax在 Stepcase Lifehack担任项目经理。它也是The Writer's Technology Companion, 这个网站旨在提供写作业工具。当他不写作时，他在拉斯维加斯，NV教授人类学和性文化。他是Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.的作者