Mysterious Prompts, Day 1: Values

Day 1: What are the top 5 values that guide your life decisions? Why are they important to you?

I found a file with 30 days of journal prompts in one of my Google Drives. I had completely forgotten saving it and I am not even sure where I acquired this set. It’s a mystery! With that background out of the way, let’s get on with it. I am not pregaming this post. I’m pantsing it. We’ll see what happens.

My Top 5 Values, in no particular order:

1. Openness
2. Creativity
3. Kindness
4. Knowing what I don’t know
5. Action

Expanded, respectively:

1. I try to live my life with an open heart and open mind, staying open to new adventures. I feel like I lost a lot of years to being too afraid of being hurt or making a mistake. I have since learned that hurt fades and mistakes are just doorways to different adventures. This is very important to me because I feel the urgency of mortality and don’t want to miss out on the people, places, and things I could have encountered if I weren’t so closed off.
2. I am a creative person by nature. I don’t just mean that I value the arts or other creative endeavors, but that I love creating things — all kinds of things. This does mean that I have way too many projects, but it also means that I always have a source of joy close at hand. Even when I am waiting in a long line, I can always tell myself a little story. That’s one of my secrets to a happy life. Needless to say, I am happiest with work that engages me to make and do, as opposed to ones that are systematic and process-driven.
3. “Kindness” is a big umbrella, covering compassion, service, charity, and all those other “love thy neighbor” virtues. It’s related to openness as well. This used to be the main key to my decision making, and I would like to get back to that. My personal guide to living this is in the Bible (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6), but I don’t think you have to be religious in any way to be kind. In fact, I have known kind people of every stripe, and I want to be more like them.
4. One of the hardest things is calling yourself out on your own assumptions. In the last year or so, I have started questioning myself about what I actually know and how I know it, especially when it comes to other people. You can’t assume you know what’s going on and you can’t take your own speculation as fact. Being open to hearing an unexpected truth is the other part of this. Sometimes your first, knee-jerk speculation is completely wrong. Anyway, you know what they say about assuming. (It makes an ass out of you and me, in case you don’t know what they say about it. ASS-U-ME.)
5. About the time I turned 40, I realized that I was a big talker with very few accomplishments in my adult life to show for it. Now I talk less and do more. In addition, done is better than perfect most of the time, especially when your perfectionism paralyzes you into doing nothing at all. This is the Way.

I really need to get back to living my values more. I don’t mean “want to.” I need to, for the sake of my sanity and self-respect. My values lead to a better, happier life. Compromising them to keep the peace leaves me with very little peace of my own.