June 2024: CENTER
Writing prompts and reflections to support you all month long
Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.
Theme for June 2024: CENTER
Picture a calendar year as a circle (or more precisely, an ellipse), inscribing Earth’s orbit around its gravitational Center, the Sun. By now, at the start of June, you’ve traveled nearly halfway around that circumference. Compared to the start of the year, you can now perceive the opposite side of the Center around which the year revolves. But it’s more than that: now that you’ve seen the Center from multiple angles, you can better imagine the whole. Centering, or reorienting toward the Center, with an eye toward situating within a larger whole, is a useful practice at any time, but especially in the middle of a process. If your 2024 feels messy so far, all the more reason to Center yourself within it now.
To Center is to draw a circle around a point, or more subtly, to situate something within a literal or metaphorical circle such that it is equidistant to every point on the circumference. The act of Centering defines what is essential, what is peripheral, and what is excluded. When you Center an object within a space (or an idea within an argument, or a character within a story), you claim its place in relationship to everything around it. And when you Center yourself in your own life, you claim your specific place in the world. Within your own set of boundaries, you act according to what is true and important to you.
Life is a push-and-pull away from and back toward your Center. You’re called outward to interact with others, expanding your awareness of the wider world, and back inward, remembering who you are. Through all these outward and inward movements, the Central point remains the same. At your Center are the values, ideas, and people most important to you — and when you focus on them, you find what you uniquely have to contribute to the world.
Our #AcWriMoments theme for June, CENTER, invites you pause and imagine yourself as the gravitational Center of your own life, much like the Sun within our solar system. Whatever the Center of your 2024 may be, you’re now in a better position to perceive it than you’ve ever been before, with enough of the year still remaining to make good use of your broadened perspective.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
What goals and/or constraints have defined the circumference or structure of your 2024 so far? Has this circumference remained the same or shifted since January? Do you sense it may be time to redraw your circumference now?
What ideas and ideals define the center around which the rest of your world revolves?
What or whom have you intentionally included in your circle this year? Think physically, socially, professionally, and/or intellectually. What or who inhabits the periphery of the circle rather than the center? Are any adjustments in order?
What or whom have you excluded from your circle this year? Where, if anywhere, have you felt excluded from others’ circles? What important information do these exclusions provide?
What resources, relationships, or practices have helped you stay oriented to your center so far in 2024? How can you reinforce these sources of support?
PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS
Diagram your scholarly center. Draw three concentric circles. The outer circle represents the world at large, the middle circle is your discipline or academic discourse community, and the inner circle is your current project. Now, populate the diagram by filling in the questions and concepts that these circles revolve around. The largest circle can be about whatever broader context makes sense for you: humanity in general, the world of the 2020s, the scholarly enterprise, the current culture, etc. The middle circle can be about your discipline(s) broadly or about a particular scholarly conversation you participate in. The inner circle can be any project, large or small, in any stage of development, that you’re working on right now. As you situate your own work at the center of these larger circles, notice how this diagram helps you clarify or focus on your priorities.
Diagram your personal center. Again, draw three concentric circles. The outer circle represents the world you live in, the middle circle is your immediate personal and professional environment, and the inner circle is you. Populate the diagram by filling in the values, beliefs, and debates that these circles revolve around and the people who inhabit each of its rings. As you situate yourself within your context, notice how this diagram helps you discern your particular place in the world.
As you live the theme of CENTER this month, what shifts into focus? Where and how can you reorient yourself toward your Center as you move into the second half of the year?
Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.
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I skipped last month to get the book and wedding done and spent the rest of May in recovery. I also completed a one year appointment and will make my fourth role transition in three years. By the end of may, I was laser focused on one word ---VOICE. So imagine my delight at this month's focus on centering.
I'm off to a good start, before I even got to the prompts, this stuck out "The act of Centering defines what is essential, what is peripheral, and what is excluded." So, my morning pages now have a wee table with three columns, essential, peripheral, and excluded. Voice is number one on the essentials list. I'm planning to finesses this all month long as I explore the rest of the prompts. Also on my to-do list is to re-read Playing Big.