Artifact 1: Life Values

Faith

Family

Friendship

Health

Security

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Integrity, Independence, Enjoyment, Loyalty, Personal Accomplishment, Wealth, Location, Wisdom,Service, Leadership,Creativity, Personal Development, Expertness, Community, Power, Prestige

Today I awoke from a short nights sleep and drove back to my home town to participate in a family tradition of making apple cider. My grandparents started this a thousand years ago and I anticipate it happening every year. I then drove my girlfriend and roommate back to school in Eugene. The most applicable values from my top 20 would probably be, family, friendship, enjoyment, and loyalty. Comparing my top five personal values to the activities that occurred today I would say that family applied the most here with friendship also. Family was the reason that I drove back to my home town. I did find the whole day enjoyable but I would have to say that it wasnt because I was able to get messy and take home some apple juice. Seeing my grandparents and family always makes me happy but I like that we were able to all engage in an activity that we like to do. Friendship applied because I was able to bring my friend and girlfriend home and joke around with them before doing more homework.

I think I inherited Faith, Family, and Friendship from my family and all of which I can say are still applicable today. I do see less of an influence that they make on these being my values, but they are definitely still my top values. I have a goal of being successful in school and living a life that involves the least amount of stress as possible. I don’t exactly know how this is going to happen at the moment but then again that is why they are goals. I would say that the things that stand in my way of these goals would be a job that pays enough to have a comfortable life and a job that is not stressful. I really hope that someday I will find a place that I will want to wake up every morning and go to.  I am not a very picky person but there is one thing that I don’t like and that is stress. As far as my values go I don’t really see them changing any time soon, but I do see them being added to.

 

 

 

REFLECTION

Creating personal values initially can be very difficult especially if one has never done so before. Lewis tells us to first start analyzing values “by asking ourselves how we come to believe anything…if you reflect carefully, you will notice there is only a few ways that we ‘know’ anything”(Pg 8). Lewis goes on to share that the four basic ways we come to know are sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition. After realizing these core elements it help me to pick my most important life values(Pg 10). The picture above with interlaced values is not my chosen values but rather an example of art and values combined. My values of faith, family, and friendship came to me strongly through the sense experience mode consisting of familiar circumstances. Just the aspect of picking my top personal values helped me explore my belief system. When I analyzed a single day I found there were many of these values hidden in many different part of my day. Both expressed by internal and external motives.

With faith as my top value I realized that this was solely an internal belief that could not be proved using any of my sense experience. This was an internal emotional reason of belief. As described in my original post, I started my day driving back to my hometown to participate in a family tradition of making apple cider as shown by the picture above. This act supported my value of family and friendship and helped me realize that I participate in this reunion every year because I hold my family very high on my list of values. This blog activity helps one to understand the internal and external reasons of value such as family by making one create values and address which values are personally seen in regular day activities. In my case I had both an internal value of emotion and external value of family that caused me to value certain aspects of my day and life.

IN THE FUTURE 

I hope that years from now I will still have these top values. As far as what new values will become apparent in the future will be interesting because there are so many paths I feel my life could take. Thus creating more values that would become more prominent. I think my top five will most likely stay the same but the other fifteen could change drastically. I am looking forward to analyzing my values based on this curriculum later in life.