A Practice Audit for Your Life
What your daily rhythms reveal about who you're becoming • Focal Things \\ Sustainable Systems
Sustainable Systems provides purpose-focused humans with deliberately designed processes, tools, and practices that are sustainable, meaningful, and beautiful.1
Take a look at your current goals. If you achieved every single one, who would you become? Now ask: Is that who you actually want to be, or just who you think you should be? Are your current goals serving a deeper purpose, or have they become the purpose themselves?
We usually start trying to discern and articulate our purpose by looking at the big picture. This week, let’s approach this from a different angle. Let’s start by looking at what we do day in and day out. What do our actions say about what we live for?
This week’s Focal Things practice is inspired by James K.A. Smith’s “Practice Audit” in Desiring the Kingdom.
First, write down the habits or activities you do on a weekly or daily basis, whether it’s exercise, commute, app checking, watching tv, and so on. We often do things mindlessly, on autopilot, so be sure to take a pause to really think about your schedule and actions throughout the day. Make note of what you do, and how much time you spend doing different sorts of activities.
Next, revisit your notes in response to our SloDo: what is your vision of the good life?
With that in mind, take 20-30 minutes to audit your activities using the following questions. Pay special attention to what you’re tending—the small, daily practices you keep returning to regardless of whether they make you impressive.
What are some of the most significant habits and practices that really shape what you think and what you do?
What do you think are the most important ritual forces in your life? If you were honest with yourself, are these positive or negative?
What do you think of some of the most potent practices in our culture or, if you have kids, what are the cultural forces that you don’t want your children shaped by?
As you step back and reflect on them, are there some habits and practice you might’ve originally thought were neutral, but upon further reflection, you see as more formative or significant?
Which of your practices have you been doing so long they’ve simply become who you are—not means to an end, but expressions of the life you’re already living?
Think back to this month’s SloDo, where you reflected on the stories you tell about your capacity, energy, and organization. Think also about anything that resonated for you in reading last week’s essay. Has anything changed or shifted for you?
This isn’t an exercise in judgment, but in noticing. We can’t change what we haven’t named. If your vision of the good life includes leisurely meals with good friends, but you find yourself more often than not eating fast food in your car on your commute, ask yourself how that came to be. The answers you discover in that gap are clues, not cudgels.
Let me know what you discover.
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
Trying to figure out how this applies to your life? That's what Systems Therapy provides. One session gets you a personal guide with tested solutions ready to implement, plus two weeks of email support as you integrate them.
