To positively affect the world, one must first start at the smallest step and work their way up. Like a Russian nesting doll, you gotta start with yourself, opening to your inner circle, then your community, and then the world. Personally, just being in a habit is what positively contributes to my growth. I need to always be constant and have a pattern to every day. For instance, every day I set myself four small goals I have to complete before sun-down. I have to work out, make at least one song with at least four bars or learn a song on an instrument, read at least one chapter of both a fiction book and non-fiction book, and be outside for more than half an hour. These four goals are small, but doing them allow me to be on a path to being efficient and allow me to have the power to contribute.
It is not about finishing these goals, but working on them, which allows me to work towards the next nesting doll-esque step of impacting my “inner circle”. Getting through good habits puts me in a better mood, and it helps me meet my goals on catching up on my closest friends, family, and animals. I feel like this is the most important category for impact, for my loved ones are who I want to impact the most. Only then can that network spread on to the world. So, I start each day by interacting with my loved ones in any way possible. Whether that be spamming reels to my roommates, calling my sister to remind her that I miss her, or calling up my hometown friends to play basketball, all count towards habits I set to love (annoy) my inner circle.
For my community, making sure I create and do positive things in my routine is what is essential for my contribution. I feel like this is similar to some of the goals I mentioned that I set to improve myself in the first section. The academic daily goals I set for myself (creating music, writing, or reading) attribute to my academic goals and I think as long as I create something per day, writing in any form, I can benefit my community. And of course, interaction such as saying hello to people or meeting new people who live near me makes other people’s day in my community to help them contribute, as little as seeing me might do that.
As for the world, as long as I love myself, love my friends, love my neighbors, create, and keep a positive attitude per day, I know I can positively contribute to the world. I think learning something new about the world every hour, through travel, through reading, through talking with strangers, or even through those late-night talks with your friends – the ones where you learn something new about them -, shapes you into contributing to the world in the easiest way possible. I think it all comes down to writing. I think that taking in from the world and observing it, can lead to changing it. As long as I have evaluated what makes this world worthwhile, through my community and loved ones, then I can keep that love going per day through hard work and habits like I mentioned before. I just tell myself that as long as I do something, I can show up for others and make this world better through those habits.
For this summer I have put extra emphasis on these goals for showing up, and have even increased them to two chapters, two songs, more cardio, etc. I want to attribute more writing routines, especially on my summer experiences. My experience will be away from home, and so I will be observing so much. I find it imperative that I don’t treat my experience like a vacation and make what I observe actual beneficial by documenting it, rather than letting it fade as a memory. Even the nights in the beer halls in Germany, even in the woods in central Alaska, I must write… and I must interact. – Raymond Vickers
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