I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about values, specifically values as the pillars that we build our life upon, as the lenses that we look at the world through, and as the engines that we want to have drive our actions.
About ten years ago I started drawing a picture of a person holding a kite. The person was a stick figure who lived on the bottom left corner of the page and the kite would be flying up near the top right. On the edges of the kite I would write out the core values that I wanted to center in my life. On the string holding the kite and the ribbons flying off of it I would write out other values that I wanted to remember, values that would help me live up to those core values on the kite. I’m not sure why I chose the imagery of the kite, perhaps I wanted to represent reaching and pulling at the same time. Whatever the reason, the imagery stuck and this stick figure holding a kite became the visual representation of my core values. It aslo became something I would repeatedly draw in all my various notebooks, a doodle, something to do with my hands while sitting through a meeting.
Eventually I noticed that the values I wrote along the drawing would change. Sometimes a value moved its position, other times a value would be replaced. I noticed that each time I sat down to draw this image I was honing my list of values, and I was developing a deeper understanding of them, of how they operated in me, of how they related to each other.
Spending time reflecting on and discovering what it is that we want to center ourselves in, that we want to be dirven by, that we want expressed in the ways we show up to the world, is one of the ways that I believe we can become better at knowing ourselves. And I believe that the more we know ourselves, the more we can actually be ourselves, and the more we can be ourselves, the more ease we will find in navigating this world.
So what are values and how do we know what ours are?
One way I think about discovering my values is to ask what it is that sits at the core of the core of my being? If I strip away all of the habits, all of the context, all of the conditioning, what am I left with? What is my essence made of?
When I think about these question for myself, the answer I always come to is love. What else is there? Love of people, love of experience, love of all that is possible in the world.
And when I trace love through my life I see that it has always been a driving force in obvious and also in not so obvious ways. When I look at my adolescent self and reflect on the anger that drove me into activism, and the fire that drove me to put so much energy into creating revolutionary spaces in the world, one of the primary things I see underneath that fire and anger was how deeply heartbroken I was about the world.
I believe we all experience this heartbreak. The world that we are born into is not the world that we would want. Perhaps it never was, perhaps we are born dreamers, perhaps it is our lot to be aspirational, to be utopian in our imagination. Children at their core are full of love, they want to be loved, they demand to be loved. They tell you what they want and need, they instruct you as to how you might fulfill those needs for them.
Thinking of children also makes me think of curiosity, of asking questions and doing the work of putting the world together. I suspect curiosity might be another one of my core values, another piece of my essence, but there’s something about it that feels a degree off. As much as I love and have always loved learning I am not a traditional learner. I do not devour information the way many of my most curious friends do. There have been and continue to be times in my life that I struggle with the fact that my form of learning is not primarily through reading books and gathering information, but is more through paying attention to my emotions and experiences.
When I think about how curiosity lives in me it is a curiosity that isn’t about knowledge and answers, it is about possibility and questions. It’s almost as though as soon as something can be known it is no longer interesting to me. Perhaps a better word than curiosity for me is wonder. Wonder is expansive, wonder is interested not in an answer but in the question, in the possibility of what might be. Wonder embraces uncertainty, it leaves room for that which we cannot understand, it is incapable of wrapping itself up in a neat bow. Wonder is what drives me to look at the moon, know that I cannot completely wrap my head around it, and smile at the mystery.
Wonder and Love make for great foundational partners, and feel quite true to my essence. But there is something else there. When I first did this exercise, I found myself feeling slightly dissatisfied with leaving it just at that. And I came to understand a truth about myself that I had known for some time and that made me a little uncomfortable. The third element of my essence is dissatisfaction itself. Along with that understanding came the realization that the way my dissatisfaction showed up was causing me quite a bit of suffering. It was keeping me chasing a set of moving goal posts. It was compelling me to value my losses more than my wins. And it was punishing me for never being enough.
And this raises for me a question about core values: what do I do when there is something core to my being that I’m not sure I want to build my foundation upon, that I’m not sure I want to see the world through the prism of, that I’m not sure I want driving my actions?
The truth is, all of our values contain a shadow side. They can sometimes show up in ways that are not great for us, that are not representative of the ways that we aspire to be. When my heart is broken love can send me into fits of rage and anger. When I am sad wonder can lead me into negative thought spirals. Likewise, dissatisfaction, which can lead with its shadow, has also shown up in ways help me reach the version of myself that I aspire towards.
In the right light, my dissatisfaction shows up as rigor, it propels me into action, pushes me into the world even when I want to retreat from it. Dissatisfaction can be the catalyst that drives me to take on hard things and not give up when at first they don’t work out.
With all of that being said, dissatisfaction does not show up on my kite. I do not reject it because it is a part of me, and I have learned to see the ways it is a helpful part of me - a part of me that I can embrace. But that doesn’t mean I want to center it in my life, in the image that I look towards. It is a core part of me but I have decided to not have it live as one of my core values.
And that brings us back to my practice of drawing and redrawing the kite. When we take time to sit with the attributes that are core to our beings, to reflect of which parts of them we do and do not want to call into our lives, to decide on the values that we want to call ourselves towards, we get to bring our own agency into the creation of the person we are and the person we aspire to continue growing towards.
This practice of naming and describing and regularly mulling over and reconsidering our values, I believe, is one way that we can do the work of becoming the person we would most like to see ourselves as.