By Kate Marie Phillips
“Open Your Eyes” is a bimonthly column seeking to expand our realm of awareness beyond the everyday tunnel-vision perspective—to encourage readers to more consistently notice the often overlooked social and environmental impacts we have upon the world, and find ways of reforming our day-to-day lives to evolve into more conscientious human beings.
Activism for others may sound foreign and unnatural, especially in a country where do-it-yourself and the emphasis of individual achievement has become the motto for most. Or maybe it really does sound nice, like a bedtime story spoken by loving parent or relative, but not really something to enact in real life. Acts of selflessness are reserved for the heroes and heroines of our books and movies like Robin Hood, Hercules, Frodo Baggins and Atticus Finch.
But, what if we too laid aside our personal goals for one hour per day for focusing on what we can do for the communities around us and even beyond — helping the globe and its infinite creatures? Just for one hour or even thirty minutes? Any act of such selflessness from every individual in the world, just for one hour would be breathtakingly good.
To see the good that has come from beyond people’s hearts and empathy, and has blossomed into real acts of kindness, check out one of the good-est, most innovative, philanthropic mediasources since National Geographic, GOOD. Also, for more inspiration, check out a well-known motivating source, Do Something.org and their page designed just for you: What’s Your Thing. You can also search through TED Talks to navigate “ideas worth spreading.”
These sources, along with many blogs and print media, just to name a few, are really trying to help us reshape ourselves. Unlike most popular media — which typically has a distorting effect upon everyday people into becoming brain-dead gossip gurus (Did you hear Kim Kardashian got flour bombed?) or ambulance chasers (Four people were shot and wounded the other night in ATL, man!) — philanthropic news takes the bad and shows how it became better, and simply how there is good that is really great. They also work to encourage positive, sustainable, and conscientious behavior, rather than the frequently negative pop news spin (Jeez, if Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears can do it, why can’t I? Take this pill and you’ll lose 15 pounds in 10 days!).
Through my recent web browsing, I’ve found some of the best ideas and articles through philanthropic sources that I encountered include GOOD’s How I Made Sleep a Priority and Got More Productive and Read Better: Five Steps Toward a More Balanced Media Diet as well as Ted Talk by Steve Jobs: How To Live Before You Die and the articles in DoSomething’s Health and Fitness section.
After reading, do what you can do. That sounds quite simple, but after all, we all have time schedules and are very “busy”. My recommendation is to start small, but begin regularly. Check out what you can do around you. You can really make an impact with your art or design in the long run, but there are also everyday things you can help your community out with. Check out the Atlanta Humane Society or Hands On Atlanta.
I encourage readers to take advantage of these communication skills — reading and listening — and turn them into more active activities for others rather than self-indulgent, passive, spoon-fed-couch-potato idleness. Thank you.