View Content #27235

By Christopher Daradics, CASLS Language Technician

This month InterCom is focusing on self-care. Julie kicked us off by revisiting and expanding on last year’s treatment of this same topic. And last week, Mandy reminded us of the importance of staying true to our biggest yeses. This week we are focusing in on intention, specifically on cultivating our own intentions and supporting others in finding and maintaining theirs.

The challenges we face in setting our own clear intentions are many and include the following:

• Genuine self-knowledge is difficult to achieve and does not necessarily manifest as the wisdom to know how to act.
• Being sensitive to our own needs is not nurtured by the cultural mainstream nor mass media.
• It is rarely obvious, from the vantage point of our moment-by-moment experience, how to practically implement our intentions.
• Learning how to hold one’s own line while maintaining grace, compassion, and presence for others is challenging and there is no one “right” way to do it.
• Our desires and our contexts are ever unfolding and changing, and life is in a constant state of flux.

Fortunately, as language experts we have two key pieces of wisdom that can be leveraged to become more adept at cultivating and manifesting intentional lives and communities.

First, we are good at languaging. This is to say, we are good at using language. We know at its core it is functional and “can-do” things in the world. If we can quiet the noise and chaos in and around us for long enough to find our own signal and put words around our experience and feelings, we will very quickly find ourselves with clarified and concrete intentions. As Jack Kerouac says, "something you feel will find its own form."

Second, we are all experts at "The Coco." Although you may not realize it yet, you are already a master of this exciting and vivacious dance! As functional language experts, we know that human experience is always dynamic, always in flux. All communication, as we understand it, is hyper-contextual, it is always emergent, and it is always on the move. As we participate with others we co-construct experience together. Every day in class by taking questions, redirecting students’ attention, and acknowledging success we are all co-constructing the unfolding of (classroom) life together. Similarly, this co-construction is mutually regulating. Our students’ bad days become our bad days—and vice versa. Likewise, our amazing lessons become the bedrock (we hope) of our students’ worldviews and ultimately their brilliant adult lives. This co-constructed, co-regulated dance is something we have already unconsciously mastered in our L1, L2, and beyond.

By taking the time to let our feelings find their own form in language, and by consciously focusing on the co-constructed and co-regulated nature of our lives together, we will naturally begin to graciously dance our way into the syncopated equilibrium of intentional, vivacious life and community.

This week’s Activity of the Week is an invitation to nurture yourself and others by setting some time aside to practice feeling and clarifying your intentions and to explore how you can consciously apply your expertise in "The Coco" into other domains of life.