WHAT I VALUE AND HOW I LIVE MY LIFE ACCORDINGLY

Yesterday evening in Collo class time, we talked about what it means to “value” something, our personal values, and how we express them. Through an exercise where we wrote down a list of our 10 most predominant values which we slowly narrowed down to 3, I came to the conclusion that my three top values were conveniently vast but accurately judged to be: love, knowledge, and happiness. Maybe not in that particular order, but for me, love is definitely the thing I value most. It sounds cheesy when I write it out like this or even explain it but it’s true… It’s true because I try to do everything that I do with love. No matter what it is, I try to assure that the love I carry within me transmits itself to the outside world through my actions. Love in all forms is always what comforts me and is at the end of the day, it’s what I remind myself exists when I’m feeling strange/off/sad/weird/confused/etc/all of the above. Love is also more than just a term that one applies as a “value”, it’s an all encompassing word that shows to what extent you value all of the things/experiences/people/ideas that inspire a certain feeling inside of you, and that’s why it’s at the top of my list. Second and third (interchangeably) were knowledge and happiness. Happiness has a huge place as a value in my life because I don’t see a point to anything unless it makes me happy in one way or another because my idea of being healthy (in most ways) is just being happy. This value of mine is expressed in my life pretty clearly. What’s gotten me this far in my life and to a pretty good degree of inner contentment has been deciding the things I care about most and how to dedicate my time to them. This process of elimination and prioritizing has been based on me asking “what makes me happy?” and through this, I’ve realized what I should spend my time doing. Overall, I compromise things for happiness. 99% of the time, I don’t regret it… and that’s how you know you really value something. However, I’ve realized that i do compromise my third listed value for other things. Knowledge, for me, shows openness to what the world offers and also is always something one can improve. Caring about something/having something in your life that you can always improve (like knowledge, for example) gives you a reason to always try to better yourself and the world; and that’s a concept that I personally need in order to stay positively motivated in this life. As much as I don’t want to admit it, I’ll sometimes stray from this value (as all people do from time to time) and in the end, it doesn’t make me happy to do this. I regret not being so knowledgeable in the literary world, and I regret that I haven’t read as many books as I know I’m capable of and that I know will enhance my knowledge, and in turn, my happiness. So, my life exercise that’s coming from this wordy-and-probably-cheesy-and-cliché blog post is that I’m going to start reading more instead of spending my time doing stupid things. Lastly, I believe that all of a person’s core values are dependent on one another. And for me, knowledge is something I love, and if I am passionate about what I love, I’ll always be happy. So if anyone (if anyone even reads these posts) has any book recommendations- let me know.