The Zookeeper's Wife is the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Polish Christian zookeepers who, horrified by Nazi racism, managed to save more than three hundred people. Author Diane Ackerman writes movingly about Polish émigré Eva Hoffman's psychic earthquake of having to shed her name in order to save her life: "Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us-but it is a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters." Suddenly Eva Hoffman's given name, and that of her sister, no longer exists even though "they were as surely us as our eyes or hands." The new names were actually "identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves." DISCOVERING WHO YOU ARE Our names, our identities, our figuring out "This is who I am" are a huge part of discovering our dreams. And haven't many of us said, "I'll start dreaming once I wrap up with X, Y, or Z project." At the same time, we are asking ourselves, "Why do I keep putting things off? There's so much to do but I can't get anything done." Perhaps we have it backwards. Perhaps having goals for ourselves is not something to do after we've wrapped up X, Y, and Z projects. Perhaps daring to dream is a goal we need to pursue now, because it's key to getting those X, Y, and Z projects done. Psychologist Timothy Pychyl writes in an article titled "Teenagers, Identity Crises, and Procrastination" that if we can't answer the questions "Who am I?" and "What am I?" we're more likely to procrastinate. In other words, the more people know who they are, the less likely they are to procrastinate. Pychyl explains the interconnectedness between identity and agency as follows: "Identity is that knowledge of who we are. . . . Agency is the belief that we are in control of our decisions and responsible for our outcomes. . . . It means we make a difference, we make things happen, we act on the world. Thus, being an active agent depends on identity, or knowing who we are." Perhaps, then, the best thing we can do is to put our busyness to the side, and instead focus on our identity and our dreams-or, as management consultant Robin Dickinson said after he read Pychyl's study, "Focus on your To-Be List, before the To-Do List." When we return to that to-do list we might just find we're actually beginning to get things done."
( Whitney Johnson )
[ Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable ]
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