Jordan here: Another thing my mom always told me was “Jordan, you need to choose your battles wisely.” Many times situations occurred where she could have let something or someone bother her and she could spend way too much time stressing over it, wondering what other people thought, but she knew that sometimes, its just not worth it. For an anonymous example, a person associated with an activity I enjoyed growing up would get under her skin on a regular basis. She could choose to bring this up to the person, raise a fuss, and likely inflate the problem. Or she could ask herself, “is it really worth it?” In this case it wasn’t. So she would always just smile at this person genuinely, and choose to put the issue in the category of “not worth my time.” Of course, issues that challenge your values or well-being should be addressed. Essentially, it’s just a matter of prioritizing your energy and resources to where you consider the most important and not wasting this energy in futile ventures.
Once I learned to appreciate this concept truly, life was and is much simpler. It, of course, can be much easier said than done. But I just had to understand what matters to me, first, and then just drop those things that didn’t make the list. For example, in ninth grade, I wanted to be on the football team and the marching band at the same time. I was catching grief from both sides saying the other activity was inferior. I decided that whichever group said I had to choose one or the other would be the one I’d drop. One day a football coach said I wouldn’t be able to perform the halftime show for that week’s game, that I was needed to stand on the sidelines (even though I would not have played). I chose to continue with music and not football from then on out.
Today is no exception, here in Ghana. Sometimes we might see things that we disagree with or we feel need our help. Today, a few other PCVs and I were having a drink after a day of gardening and I noticed a woman seemingly being harassed by a man who was clearly “bushed” aka intoxicated. Perhaps he knew the woman and they were just playing around. So I watched a little closer and to my best judgment, the woman was not appreciative. But I have to remind myself of my father’s words, “everything is relative…and we know your relatives.” Although the second part just demonstrates my dad’s dorky sense of humor that I have proudly inherited, it just means that those things that bother us are bothersome because we may have some different values relative to how it is here. Anyway, we decided to intervene. A quick slip of the tongue by a member of us really torqued the guy. Later that night he was harassing us and came up to us confronting the person, angrily, who had set him off. I silently thought “we all need to choose our battles wisely here” and eventually both parties agreed that this was not worth getting twisted up about and we all parted ways. Hence, battle averted.
However, some values are shared universally, and we need to choose which of these things are worth a battle: basic human rights, health, and earning a livelihood to name a few. Training after training makes me feel like starting up a hundred projects well knowing I’m lucky if one or two really take off. If we stretch ourselves too thin, not enough will be put to each project and all will fail. But how do we know how we can best impact our community? Everyone has their opinions and they’re all different. Essentially, we need to choose our own battles according to our best judgment about what is truly important to us and our community and give it our best shot. Fortunately, I learned this at a young age from my parents…
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