Magis Musing is my reflection on what I learn in classes and group discussions. Every week I receive different prompts, and I write down 400-500 responses. I can write almost whatever I want to write, and I really enjoy the calmness when I am doing Magis Musing. In the following passages, I will show what I have reflected upon life with PERMA, healthy lifestyle, The Jesuit Guide, sleep hygiene, emotional intelligence, and loneliness. In hindsight, I can see that I gradually approach these topics with a more organized and mature way of thinking.
I will keep on writing short reflections every week later on. There will be some prompt questions such as: how do you deal with stress this week? How do you keep a healthy diet this week? I enjoy writing something down.
Magis 1
With PERMA, I expect my life to become more relaxing while organized. Flourishing tells us that well-being not only enhances our physical fitness but also improves our mental healthiness. After school starts, my living schedule has changed dramatically to accommodate the synchronous class schedule. I learned in high school biology that staying up late can influence the hormone level of the body and cause side effects (or direct effects) that change one’s emotion. A week ago, I did not quite sense the change in my emotion, however, I find out recently, that I laugh out loud less often; I show more stress to my family; and I feel more exhausted when I think about things. Despite one’s mood does not equal to well-being; I want to adjust my current mood and improve my well-being together by flourishing PERMA.
A picture of my ideal life arises in my mind, as soon as I see this question. Under the blue clear sky, I sit on a floral blanket and have a cat sleeping on my lap. There is sunshine, breeze, and lawn, and me with a book in my hands. I am fascinated by the content, and my phone is put aside so I can avoid the blue lights emitted from there while also answer it when it rings. Besides, I know on the other side of my phone, my families and friends are always there for me. When it is getting late and people start to go back, I can call them, and they will drive to pick me up.
I think this picture, or gif actually, could be an example illustrating what I think my life with PERMA will be like. I will be always supported and allowed to be thoughtless and even child-like; I can do whatever I like to do without checking my “to-do list”; I will feel completely relaxed if I can sit on the lawn in one random park for the entire day, without worrying the endless upcoming works that force me to be awake at 2 a.m. Engagement comes from the journey of diving into my own world of reading, and meaning appears when I close the book and go through some intriguing episodes. When thinking about achievement, I do not really relate “win” with being the richest person in the universe or saving the world when roaring flood destroys everywhere besides Himalaya. I think about myself, as an individual, doing the best I can do at the current moment. All of these will contribute to my cheerful mood and positive emotion later on, and I believe such satisfaction will last if I make PERMA a part of my life.
Magis 2
This March, my high school was closed due to COVID-19, therefore I had to return home in a week. It was a huge shock and challenge for me. I did not expect that school closure happened so quickly, nor did I expected the difficulty of looking for flight tickets. At that time, many countries in the world are gradually refusing Chinese passengers to enter without visas, which brought me a lot of trouble when I was searching for flight tickets. Meanwhile, flight tickets became expensive day by day, and they were sold out immediately after they were released. Fortunately, I got a flight ticket one day at midnight and was able to get back home in the middle of March.
But I did not realize that bigger challenges came next until I arrive home. I went through a 14-day quarantine in an assigned hotel. The hotel room was quite comfortable actually; there is a large bed, a clean bathroom, and a really nice bathtub. However, comfortable life made me lazy. In the 14-day quarantine and half of a mouth after that, I did not do anything besides waking up at noon, have lunch and watch shows till dinner.
That lifestyle was neither good for my health nor my “happiness”. I soon felt that I was wasting my life, while I was not glad for having an empty life. For sure I did not have to worry about my assignments; I thought I would be happy and relaxed, but they lasted for such a short period of time, and then disappeared. In May, I made a decision to apply for an internship. That decision impacted my life, and it, to a large extent, changed my life during COVID.
I worked in HR department, where I learnt a lot of things every day. I had never worked in a company, so it was challenging for me in the beginning. During my first two weeks there, my job varied from organizing the warehouse to filtering resumes. I was exhausted every single day after work. I struggled to find the importance of my work, because I felt it could be done by anyone, not necessarily me, which made me frustrated. However, I did not choose to quit; it was my internship and also a great opportunity to learn things from. I requested myself to insist for a month at least, and do not compromise to failures.
I am very glad for the decision at that time. After a month, I surprisingly found everything became easier. I was more familiar with my work and able to complete them better. it was not as hard as a month ago. I started to expand and enjoy my work, therefore, I decided to insist on one more month, and one more month, till the end of my internship. I think that is how I show grit and make my life flourishing when I face adversity in COVID-19.
Magis 4
I am very touched by the explanation of the path of disbelief, which I believe is the one I most identified with currently. I hesitate to define myself as an atheist because I know that the knowledge which I possess right now is insufficient for me to make that claim, but this path provides me, at least, some approaches to interpret and understand the presence of God. It is very interesting to see that the presence of God can even apply to people who do not believe in God or believe in an intellectual way to “prove” God. Therefore, I would say a big take-away after reading Jesuit guide is a more inclusive image of God; God can meet us anytime, no matter how we feel, where we are, and who we are.
After four-week (approximately) writing of gratitude journal, I find it is a great way to pause and retrospect the whole day. I usually complete my gratitude journal at night, when I finish all my classes and turn off my laptop. I prefer to start my writing by a short meditation, which helped me better recall the details of things for which I feel grateful. This is very similar with the meditation, which brings people to think about the presence of God. My next step of completing gratitude journal is starting to write it, but I will ask myself to write them as detailed and precise as I can. I hope in the future, when I look back on my journals, this happiness can thankfulness can appear in my mind. Gratitude journal is a way to feel and appreciate the gratitude in our daily life, and these Jesuit guides are ways to realize the presence of God. I find this parallel interesting.
I also want to mention the last story in Chapter 4, the little fish. For a lot of times, people do not miss out something, but they just miss out to realize that thing. The reason for me to continue writing gratitude journals is the opportunities to conclude my day. A demanding schedule makes me feel anxiety and worrisome. Therefore, a pause, as I mentioned above, is extremely helpful and important. Both gratitude journals and Jesuit guides provide me the pause button, allowing me to retrospect my day and gain from it. I really like the theme behind them: you don’t need to look for. All you need to do is to look.
Magis 7
Getting enough sleeping, a necessary element for one’s health, including but not limited to relief of stresses and anxieties, memory consolidation, and better function of the immune system and endocrine system is challenging especially for university students who are expected to work diligently every day. The primary obstacle that university students face is the difficulty of balancing study and rest time, in other words, how to efficiently study and eliminate procrastination, and meanwhile form a schedule for resting. It must be admitted that a scheduled life requires a lot of determination to persist in, a valuable quality that is yet hard to achieve.
My sleeping hygiene is composed by three factors: first, going to bed every night before 11:30 p.m. and falling asleep before 12:00 a.m., as this is the most suitable arrangement that I found so far to maximize my working time while fully preserve the optimal sleeping time from 12:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. ; second, keeping electronics away from my eyes, an effective measure that eliminates the impact of blue light to my sleeping quality and helps me not to procrastinate on my sleeping time; third, playing some white noise or sound of nature, such as birds’ singing and wind breezing, to help me fall asleep faster for it relaxes my nerve as if I am taking a bath in a tab of warm water.
Studying with a nocturnal schedule, I, waking up every day at 13:00 and going to sleep at 3:00, tried to change this sleeping hygiene after I entered Georgetown this August. However, I soon found the negative impact of this unhealthy schedule on my body. Besides becoming less energetic and moodier, I caught a cold in the third week in September and throw out for the entire weekend which almost made me dehydrated. I was told that the unhealthy schedule had influence my digestive system, because I ate at midnight as my “lunch”, but my intestine was not accustomed to digesting and absorbing nutrients at midnight, which was supposed to be its resting time. The doctor suggested me to change my life schedule as soon as possible, or my health might be worse in the future.
Therefore, I determined to maintain my old sleep hygiene, a proven-suitable, and successful schedule for my health. After all, I do not want to throw out on weekends and had to cancel all the plans that I previously made for Saturday and Sunday.
Magis 8
I got a medium to high score in the emotional intelligence test: 8 for self-awareness, 8 for self-management, 8 for social-awareness, and 8 for relationship management; in these more specific scales, I scored 22 out of 25 in adaptability, 23 out of 25 in empathy, 22 out of 25 in emotional self-awareness, 14 out of 25 in positive outlook, and 17 out of 25 for emotional control.
Thinking about my personality and experiences, I am not surprised to see these scores. I am not an introvert person, which means that in most cases I seek for collaboration to solve issues, and I enjoy the feeling of working with people. This makes me do better and better when I am growing up in relationship management. In teamwork, the results can be suddenly changed by a single factor, usually a participant’s emotion. Therefore, I form the habit of paying attention to people around me, observing what they are happy for or what they worry about and offering encourages or supports as they need. Also, as a factor who can change the end result, I learn to understand myself and control my own emotion during the process. Together with the higher level of self-recovery and adjustment, emotional intelligence, a goal-oriented personality appears, which I do not deem as a bad thing necessarily, but sometimes does play a crucial role in fluctuating my mood.
I entered an international high school in the US, although I spent my entire middle school life in a public middle school in my hometown, China, there were so many barriers and struggles in the beginning, in which the hardest two to overcome were language barrier and cultural shocks. I cannot remember the detail of how I managed to overcome these, but I totally agree that trying to embrace challenges and defeat them, I gained a high adaptability in my high school.
A high score of empathy relates to my hobby of writing (in Chinese). For creating real and relatable characters, I always make myself the character and think: what will they react to this sudden change? How can they reconcile with their enemies? What are they thinking of at this moment? This exchange of position extends to my daily life. With the previous exercises with my characters, it is easier for me to empathize with others. Positive outlook and emotional control are the two blind spots that I need to address or improve. My mood and outlook are not as optimistic as it was before COVID, which significantly affected my plan for this year. with all the stress of midterm etc., my self-adjustment needs to work immediately to help me feel better. I have started to do regular work out and everyday reading, and I look forward to seeing positive changes happening on me soon.
Magis 9
It is hard to perceive our loneliness, but it can explode just like all other negative emotions (disappointment, self-doubt, depression, anger, frustration, and so on) and cause consequences. In high school, I once researched the factors that affect adults’ suicide rates. The result shocked me: people who live alone have a higher suicide rate than people who live in poor areas. I wondered if income level impacts their suicide rate, yet in fact, people who live alone have much higher disposable income than people who live in cheap apartments with their whole family do. Therefore, loneliness is more harmful than many expected. This research, coming into my mind after two years when I take a university sociology course, offers me a glimpse into the issue of loneliness.
Is building a relationship with someone more difficult now? I say yes and no. In many circumstances, this statement is true because we live such a busy life, the emails crowding in our mailbox, the phone occupying more than a third of our day. We have much less time to meet new people than before, and we sit in front of our desks for longer and longer. However, on the other hand, are these things inevitable? I do not think so. In the last two weeks, I challenged myself by only using my phone for 40 minutes every day. I was anxious in the first few days, worrying about if I would miss important messages, but at the end of the day I turned on my phone, I saw only 12 messages. After replying to them, I turned off my phone and went to bed. Over the past two weeks, I extracted more than 60 hours from my study time and leisure time by being more efficient. Seeing a lot of free time, I became more relaxed than before. We do have time to make friends and break the loneliness bubble. We are not as busy as we assume.
picture: https://pixabay.com/photos/cafe-architecture-building-greece-3537801/
