What I Learned from my Journey Journal

Before this class, I had never kept a journal of any kind. I had nothing against them, I simply never thought they were necessary. Keeping this journey journal has been an eye opener for me. It has helped me keep track of, and better understand, my own personal journey. Much of what I wrote was not a documentation of my physical journey, and a lot more simply how I was feeling at that particular moment.

This semester I have been passing through various emotional difficulties. A lot of times in the past, when I have felt similar ways for different reasons, it was very easy to lose the source of how I was feeling. I would just feel horrible in general without really knowing why I was feeling that way, or how it was affecting my everyday life. With this journal, I could see on a daily basis the kind of things that were on my mind, and the connection between how I was feeling, and how my day was going. Days when I had a lot of negative things on my mind I tended to arrive late for my classes, for example, which in turn made me feel even worse. It is still unclear to me if my bad days were caused by how bad I felt or if I felt bad because of how my day was going, but there was certainly a clear pattern of correlation.

Also, within the journal, there was the compases to register how I felt emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically. This helped a lot for me to simplify how I was feeling, and also helped me realize that those bad days were often accompanied by a compass where I noted that I physically wasn't feeling well, specifically when I was hungry or tired. I once learned in an education class (specifically, a class about Educative Psychology) that the brain tends to function and react more emotionally than logically when one is angry, lonely, hungry or tired. Is this to say the entire severity of my problems were caused by days when I did not eat or sleep enough? Not at all; but I am certain that these physical deficiencies had to do with how I felt about things that were happening to me. Last, but not least, having a space to channel how I was feeling very often helped me find my own solutions for problems that before were just floating around in my head, that I felt had no solution.

Besides these reasons that writing has benefited my understanding of myself, I feel that it has helped me in my development as a future educator. Once, various semesters ago, I had a professor who told me I needed to be working harder on the class work, and when I told her that the semester had been difficult for me because of some personal problems I was having with my family, she told me that I had to learn to separate my personal problems from my responsibilities, that everybody has problems, but everyone manages to get their things done. At the moment I accepted what she said, and told her I would do my best to make this separation. After a long time of considering her words, and specifically now after being able to observe my own feelings and how they relate to my capability to get things done, I’ve come to the conclusion that she was not entirely right. Yes, it is important to prioritize one’s work, and to try hard not to let anything get in the way of getting your priorities done, but going along with the general ideas of Paulo Freire (my favorite author, who wrote books philosophizing about education) I believe that modern day educators need to keep the humanity of their students in mind. Each student is their own person; everyone has their own problems, yes, but every person has their own way of reacting to their problems, depending on a lot of independent factors in each individual’s life. We cannot act as though students are machines that can just shut off an entire part of themselves in order to complete tasks at an identical quality and rate as all the others. Particularly in creative works, I would dare say it’s impossible to separate one’s personal journey from one’s creations, and even if it were possible, the work would have so much less meaning. Humans are social creatures, we are naturally drawn to wanting to understand each other, so why do we have an educational system that acts as though everyone must learn things without associating with the personal? Why do we have (some) educators who seem to believe that viewing their students as individuals is not important? Studying is part of each student’s interior journey, and I will work my best to be a teacher who does not tell them to ignore their journey in order to comply with my classes requirements. Instead, I will try to formulate my class in a way that they might use the knowledge they acquire as an integral part of everything they are going through.

What I Learned About Journeys in this Class

When I enrolled in this course, I thought I would learn about literature, figuratively “journeying” through readings of books. In reality, I learned a lot more about journeys, and about my own journey, than I learned about literature. This outcome is not what I had expected, but it is something I needed, more than I ever could have anticipated.

During this semester we read excerpts from various books, all about the different authors’ different kinds of journeys. After every reading we were given the opportunity to reflect on how we could see our own lives from a similar perspective to what we read. This lead to me considering and concreting thoughts about my life that had always been in my head but I had never organized or contemplated with such depth.

One excerpt we read, for example, by Peter Roberts, elaborated about the concept of identity and the feeling of “being at home” when around people similar to oneself. This lead me to contemplate my identity, and how most my family background causes me to be very different from the people that live around me on this island I consider home. My whole journey through life, including my education and my relationship with my family, led me to be very different from the people around me, and to have a lot of trouble feeling as though I knew where “home” is.

Besides learning about myself and my own journeys, it was very interesting to learn about all of my classmates through what they wrote and read in class. Even though we wrote about the same topics, since each was related to each of our own life experiences every reflection was very unique and heartfelt. It is obvious that we have all lived different experiences, but it was really interesting hearing how each person expressed themselves about the same kinds of things. One often takes for granted the vastness and complexity of other’s journeys. The things that make them happy, their complications; everything that makes the people one knows who they are is often not on one’s mind, no matter how much time is spent together. It is easy to get caught up in one’s own problems and one’s own life, and to not really consider how other people could be feeling, and what they could be going through. One’s experiences are a direct influence on how one acts, how one thinks, and how one interprets the world. I very much enjoyed hearing so many personal stories from my classmates. It helped me understand them and who they are so much better than in other classes, where classmates are simply taken for granted.

A More Conscious Walk Around My Block

    Whenever I go out to walk, whether to get somewhere or just to walk around, I usually have my earphones on, listening to music. I feel a lot less anxious about getting where I need to go when I can distract myself with music, which has a way of filling my head and chasing out unpleasant thoughts. After reading an excerpt from Alexandra Horowitz's book on looking, it was time for me to go out and attempt to be more conscious of my surroundings.
     I decided to walk around my block because I have lived in this neighborhood for various years, and also before I even lived around here I had visited this area many times, because my mother works close by, and this first school I went to was a couple of neighborhoods over, so once in a while I would walk around the city with my friends after school and we would pass by here. I have walked past these streets so many times that everything is much too familiar for me; because of this, like Horowitz mentioned, I tend to space out the details. My mind says "I've seen this already", and I go on my way with other things on my mind that don't have much to do with my surroundings.
     I took notes, as I walked, of everything that caught my attention. One thing I noticed a lot was that on my street and on the first street I turned on, (a street which I usually avoid walking on alone after dark, due to the fact that there are often homeless people on it) had a lot more trash on the floor than I had ever cared to notice. Not bags of trash, simply bags, cans, bottles, etc. randomly strewn about, mostly mixed in with dry leaves. It occurred to me that the strange little back-street I live on and the ominously forgotten-about side street don't often get cleaned by municipal workers. Why would they? There are not many important places on those streets. I then noticed, reaching the Ponce de Leon, a main avenue in the city I live in, that there was suddenly a lot less garbage all over the pavement. This is probably due to the many businesses on the avenue. On the other street that leads down to my street there was also a cleaner sidewalk, but I walk down that one enough to have noticed that it was cleaner simply because people came to clean it up a couple of days before, because it still had fallen tree trunks and things from hurricane Maria.
      Another thing I noticed was how many things remain without fixing since the hurricane. It has already been more than half a year, but there are still many things just left the way they are. A fallen metal light post on the Ponce de Leon, pieces of a fallen wooden light post on one of the streets that leads down to my street (even though it was removed to put a new one in it's place, the broken pieces were left on the floor), and even, as I mentioned, one sidewalk was only recently cleaned up, and there are still a couple of tree trunks sliced into pieces but just left there. Even on my street there is still a tree that fell over during Irma, the hurricane that passed a couple of weeks before Maria, just left leaning on the wall that it fell on. It has been so many months since these hurricanes' passing that I had stopped really noticing all the things that have been left unattended. They have just become a regular part of my surroundings. It makes me wonder what some other, less central and less urban, parts of the island may look like today.
     All in all, this was a very interesting experience for me. It made me realize how much of my surroundings I take for granted, despite the fact that I usually think I am aware of what is around me. It is amazing how listening to music when I walk usually doesn't only distract my hearing and my thoughts; it also distracts me enough that I do not really see everything. It reminds me of what one of my professors in a human development (in relation to education) class I took said, about how we may think we can focus on various things at once, but in reality the brain is only able to really concentrate on one thing at a time. When we think we are multitasking we are simply switching our focus back and forth, not really attending both things at once. So, when we walk, if we are thinking about things other than our surroundings (as most people do), then there is no way that we are really seeing and paying attention to everything around us.

Reflection about A. Horowitz's "Amature Eyes"

Alexandra Horowitz, in her book “Amature Eyes”, wrote about the way most people lack the ability to really pay attention. We lack the capacity, or the want, to really see everything, even when we feel we are being more attent than usual. “We are not blinded, but we have blinders.”(Horowitz, 9). The excerpt I read was the introduction to her book, where she analyzed the perspective of various different people walking around various types of blocks. 

One of the key points she makes in this excerpt is that no body knows what paying attention really is. There are people who have studied it but these people only recorded how it feels, and did not really offer a definitive answer on how to do it. “In researching what people perceived attention to be, psychologists found that school teachers instructed their students to pay attention to an image by ‘holding the image still as one would with a camera.’ To concentrate, to pay attention, is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise. Sit still, don't blink, and attend.” (Horowitz)

I have trouble paying attention. Not just from people not teaching me the “right way”, but from not hardly being enforced to pay attention at all. I was home-schooled by my mother, a musician who, from my perspective, seemed to prioritize the importance of spontaneity and creativity over seriousness and concentration, in the way she taught me and my siblings. This was good for many reasons, but also not-so-good in terms of my self discipline and focus. Due to this, I tend to drift between sometimes just “spacing out”, and most times paying sporadic bits of attention to various things all at once. Once this is combined with my obsessive need to perfect everything, or to do it “the right way”, I have always been known to take a longer time than most people doing things in general.

Although, in my general all over the place attention span, I tend to miss out on specifics or sometimes forget important things, I also sometimes pick up on strange details that other people tend to miss. Because of this, I have always been pretty convinced that I am very aware of my surroundings when I go walking (I tend to walk a lot, to get around and sometimes just to watch the sunset), much like the author. Although, since she states “Surely I had seen all that really mattered on the block. … I was consciously looking. What could I have missed? (¶) As it turns out, I was missing pretty much everything. After taking the walks described in this book, I would find myself at once alarmed, delighted, and humbled at the limitations of my ordinary looking. My consolation is that this deficiency of mine is quite human.” (Horowitz, 8) I am looking forward to doing this experiment myself, attempting to see more than what is usually evident to me. I feel like it will be fun, and maybe it will give me a different perspective on the world around me.