Throughout this semester, I’ve been balancing the CofC English Capstone curriculum with my personal plans. I’m set to go to law school, but there is still much to learn from our class. In “What Color is Your Parachute?” by Richard Bolles, there is an activity called the Flower Exercise, which is a seven piece self-inventory meant to help individuals figure out what they are looking for in work. The Flower Exercise has helped me narrow down my plan and especially has helped me decide where I will go to law school.
There are seven overall petals, ranging from smaller questions such as “who do you want to work with?” to larger questions like “what is your life’s purpose?” For me, I felt as though I already knew the petals about my skills and working conditions, but two petals that taught me a lot were petal 6, “Places,” and petal 7, “Purpose.”
One of the biggest struggles for me right now is picking where I want to go to law school. I have consistently heard that where you go to law school is generally the state in which you will practice, and my interview with Morgan Insley, filed under the Alumni Profile section, confirmed this belief.
I knew that I wanted to practice in the Southeast, but that’s about all I knew. Undertaking petal 6, “Places,” I had to really focus – where have I lived, what did I like/dislike, what do I need vs. could live without – and that was something I’ve never thought about. I always thought I’d just stay in Richmond, my home town. That’s not off the table, but this exercise made me realize I might want to go further South. After careful consideration, I ranked certain things higher than I thought I would have – for example, nature. I put nature as the fourth most important thing. I have taken trips to visit my friends in New York and I literally had headaches every time and just couldn’t deal with the city. This petal exercise made me cut out those dreams that really just make no sense.
And yet, Atlanta still made it onto my list of top places to live. There are other factors that are even more important to me – a Jewish community is up at number two. I was raised essentially secular but have been moving towards Modern Orthodox practice for the past two years. I wake up every morning and attend shacharit services, among many other practices, and it has really changed my life. I realize now that going somewhere extremely rural or that simply does not have a Jewish community is out of the picture for me. It would make me unhappy in everything I do, and somewhere like Atlanta has a strong community.
Then there’s petal 7, “Purpose.” This was the petal that took me the most time, because I had to push out the corporate talk that I’ve used for so many professional applications. Yes, the goals are important there, but there is more to my purpose than work. After careful consideration, I wrote out the main important things for me: a faith and community driven lifestyle, respect in both life and death, with physical and mental flexibility.
Yes, that’s relatively abstract, but those are the pieces that matter to me. It means that I want to be a daily congregant at a synagogue, where I can learn and connect with friends with a similar background. It means that I want to do good things for the people around me, being able to host or provide for others. It means that I want to treat people better than I do and feel good about how I act to people, whether they know it or not (if you’re dead, you’re probably not caring how I treat you…) And finally, it means that I have the physical condition to do what comes to me: whether I want to lay on the couch all day or play basketball (my favorite sport) with my grandchildren. It means that I can continue to push myself through lifelong learning, just like my grandparents – I never want to stop.
I am so glad for this exercise and will continue to revisit it as my plans change.
