Must Also Look Forward Art As Moral Action Assign
Part I.
In this paper, articulate three things that you will choose to
commit your life to in the next decade.
Part II.
Identify three principal obstacles (internal and external) that
stand in the way of you accomplishing one of these things.
Part III.
Discuss the ways in which you can see through these
obstacles and overcome them.
This paper should be helpful for you and provide a moment of clarity, equilibrium
and resolve in your real life. If this paper would become deeper and more useful if
you focus entirely on one commitment instead of three, please proceed. If going
into detail about a single obstacle and your hopes, plans, and strategies for
overcoming it will create a paper that is more powerful and useful for the next ten
years of your life, please proceed. Please write the paper that allows you to dig the
deepest, think most creatively, and envision and make your own personal
breakthroughs.
In writing this paper, please feel free to reference the content and language of The
Diamond Sutra, and/or The Noble Eightfold Path (Right View, Right Thinking,
Right Mindfulness, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Diligence, Right
Concentration, Right Livelihood). If however that language is not immediately
useful to you, please write on the basis of your own understanding, the wisdom
that you have gathered through your own life experience, using your own words,
thoughts and feelings.
Guidelines
1) This paper is for you and is intended to mark an important moment of arrival,
departure, or transition in your own life. Please write the paper that you need to
write at this time in your life, a paper that can serve you as a guide, a reminder, a
moment of vision, a period of reflection, assessment, regrouping, reaffirmation,
revitalization, and renewed commitment.
2) Please write this paper for yourself. This paper will be important for you to read
in 10, 20 and 30 years from now. You are writing at a formative moment in your
life and the act of writing this paper will be a significant contribution to the
formation of your future. This paper is an act of self-empowerment. Take the
time to write beautifully.
3) Academic language is completely unacceptable, as it tends to falsify, inflate,
deflect, routine, or otherwise calcify the nature of your actual experience. You
are the only person in the world who has had your experiences. You, therefore,
are the expert and the authority, and your search for your own words to
understand and describe your experiences, and the aspirations, values, belief
systems, and personal standards that are a result of those experiences, is itself an
act of courage and care and is a gift to the world.
4) The paper should address issues or situations that you have dealt with in the past
or are in the process of dealing with right now in your life. It must also look
forward, and become an occasion for you to project yourself into your own future,
and create a scenario in the life that you would like to live.
5) It is important to be very clear about motives, their complexities and
contradictions, and to deal as accurately as possible with the layered personal,
political, social, economic, psychological, or religious contexts of the
environment in which you are acting. Those tensions, and their repercussions,
create the need and opportunity for leadership, honesty, attentiveness, mutual
recognition, divergence, and skill. The more honest you are, the more surprising
and helpful your writing will become.
6) All narrative is “multiple” — voices, time frames, and points of view. Experience
is both intensely personal and shared. A deeper look into the intensely personal
side reveals that you yourself have many voices and conflicting selves. And, an
acknowledgment of shared experience leads to the awareness that so does
everyone else.
7) Many people spend a lot of time doing things that do not need to be done. This
paper, in contrast, should be something that needs to be done. This paper should
be something that helps you and the people around you, a moment in your life
which you can focus your attentions and intentions unselfishly. As with the
creation of any work of art, this paper will require you to deal with what you do
not understand as well as with what you imagine you understand. The struggle
towards understanding is your own story of complexity, subtlety, skill, tenderness,
insight, persistence, and humility.
8) Infinitude. Open-endedness is one of the most important aspects of your life. It is
important to be conscious of ongoing processes and continuously transforming
experience. In fact, your life has no fixed points; experiences are lived and
relived, always with new meanings and new possibilities. Even as you are
writing, talking, and acting, things are changing.
9) The paper should be 8 – 10 pages.