“Using your gifts” she said.
“What gifts?” thought the self-deprecating part of my mind.
But that was the writing challenge issued to me by Leslie. A post on using my gifts. A true corker if there ever was one. But the thing about Leslie is that she always does come up with the best ideas and hardest challenges.
I spent Sunday mulling it over in my mind. The assignment basically had two parts. Firstly defining what my gifts were and secondly how I could use my gifts in everyday life.
Gifts, gifts, gifts.
The lyrics to ‘Simple gifts‘ popped up in my head.
‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free
‘Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.’
I then searched YouTube for the Aaron Copland version (Appalachian Spring) and searched Wikipedia for the background on Simple gifts and its influences on various social and intellectual movements of the early to mid 20th century. I then remembered when I first heard that song in elementary school in the early 80’s and how the headmistress would sometimes make us sing it in a round at morning prayers. But twisting and turning a subject round and round in my head wasn’t helping anything. People always do say that I have a tendency to do that when presented with a problem. I will worry over a problem from the left, right, top, and bottom trying out different perspectives. Sometimes I have to concede that an obvious solution to a problem is the best course but sometimes I will find a path previously unconsidered by others.
The topic kept nagging at me through lunch. A rock in my shoe would have been less distracting.
Leaving things hanging and unresolved is not my style. Nor is it to give up so easily. I supposed that it’s a bull-headed stubbornness that refuses to give up. A quality that has marked me since birth and one without which I would not be alive today. I had been in the Colorado mountains one Summer when while crossing a fast-moving stream a rock gave way under my foot and the stream dragged me down with it. It’s amazing how quickly your mind works in these situations.
“So this is how I’m going to die. I wonder if my body will be found downstream or if some wild animal will scavenge me.”
A particularly solid rock knocked some sense back into me.
” No. No, I am not going out this way.”
Just that quickly I decided to live and slowly but surely I pulled myself to shore. On the wrong side of the stream but on shore.
After sitting on the shore for a minute and considering that I might freeze to death or some previously mentioned wild animal might make a meal of me, I got up and hobbled down the stream and through the woods till I finally found a scientist doing the same thing I was doing, taking water samples, and he drove me back to a hospital. Somehow I managed to hang on to my satchel full of water samples that I had collected and finished my paper on abandoned mine sites polluting streams.
But again such ruminations didn’t serve to further my purpose.
Perhaps I had to take a new tack on the problem at hand and consider the whole issue via a set of examples, stories, and collected experiences from my own past. It is said that the INFJ personality types are born story tellers and delight in the role of playing the mentor. I have also found it valuable in the past to relate experiences from my own life to provide precedents and illustrations for points or ideas that I was trying to transmit to others. If I advise someone on a particular course of action they usually do not respond as well as when I would furnish them with examples of how I had met with a similar problem and overcome it. So perhaps some stories relating how my gifts would emerge and be used in situations from the present and the past?
Was the solution to this writing assignment this simple?
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