ANALYZING…   FILE TYPE: Digital Journal Entry PERIOD: Colony Era SPEAKERS: Strauss, B. [ID: BSTR] TOPIC: The Value of Self-Reflection to Personal and Professional Growth SUMMARY: Dr. Strauss examines the impact of daily reflection on his life and works. =================================================================== [BSTR]: "The unexamined life is not worth living." [BSTR]: We start here. And we return, daily, until examination transitions from task to habit to standard point of function. Routine informing an individual's existence, then feeding into its evolution as the consideration of moments—events, emotions, causes and effects, intention and reaction—provides the tools to adapt to one's environment or a given situation through the mathematics of experience. [BSTR]: These journals are a record intended specifically for the dual purpose of active examination of my current focus and for future returns on the investment made in documenting my thought process in a given moment. [BSTR]: If I'm honest, an ancillary goal at this stage in my life is the creation of fodder for future publications. How much that will color my language and my honesty remains to be seen, though my intentions are pure—recording of the moment and for the moment's sake. We shall see how long or often that purity can be retained. [BSTR]: The importance of this daily practice—when days are available to me, which, considering the journey we have just begun, will be limited, but such is the reality of our grand experiment… [BSTR]: The importance of this practice is in the emotional and educational value in considering oneself. I am bettering myself when critical of my existence. And, when given the time, reflection allows improvement and the opportunity to move beyond stagnation. Reflection, contemplation, meditation is the start. The beginning of understanding the you of yesterday, today, and the beginning of imagining your tomorrow. [BSTR]: I've done this—kept journals—since I was child. Since first reading the aforementioned quote at the library and finding myself struck by a formative bout of existential dread. [BSTR]: The thought of wasting my life—jumping moment to moment, never learning from successes and failures, never finding myself, my joys, fears, desires. More so, never confronting them. Never grappling with what it means to have experienced or felt the consequences of living. [BSTR]: All easily couched in the high-minded language of a travelled and educated mind, but, really, mostly, it was likely a juvenile reaction to my parents and their lives. At the time, anyway. Those words allowed me to feel seen and to see beyond myself. My life. [BSTR]: I didn't want to end up like them. But I imagine few children do—want to end up like their parents. Once beyond the age idolatry, it is natural to be driven to surpass your lineage. Whether or not any of us ever do is another conversation, and one made more complex by the intricacies of defining success and failure, person-to-person, life-to-life. [BSTR]: I wonder what my children will think of me. [BSTR]: Not a concern for now. [BSTR]: But someday, maybe, when they can consider beyond their programming, it is a conversation I look forward to having. =================================================================== TYPE: TEXT [X]; AUDIO [ ];