A thought...

A memory from this past school year has been on my mind of late and I thought I should share it. It is a lesson one of my professors taught me about priorities.
The class I was taking was called Natural Resources and the Environment. We learned about regulations, case studies, environmental history and such. I have to say it wasn't my favorite class; I didn't like it at all, but it was a requirement of my program and so there I sat three times a week in a giant lecture hall of at least 100 people listening to this guy try and teach us about the environmental movement.
He was pretty good at keeping our attention usually. He did things like show video clips or bribe us with timbits. One day though, he particularly got me.
He got on the subject of priorities, what we all value and count as important. He put up a list on the power-point and told us to put everything in order from what we thought was the most important to the least important. Here's the list to the best of my memory:

education
your left arm
your television
the lives of two African children
your computer
nice clothes
health
a big house
new car

So we each took a sheet of paper and began to order the list (give it a try yourself right now).
After about five minutes, he told us to stop and share what we had put down. Being idealist university students, we all put down the Africans as number one or two, followed closely by education, health, etc. We all put "material goods" at the bottem of our list because we, as enlightened educated individuals, knew that these things just weigh us down.
Our professor nodded and smiled at us as we congratulated ourselves on picking out what was obviously the most important in the list. Then he told us a story.
He has spent quite a few summers in Africa doing his research. He was doing alot of work with very poor communities, studying how they live and he told us that every summer he goes there, he meets alot of children. While he is there, he does what he can to help out, but every summer he returns, many of the children he met the previous summer have died of curable ailements. They die of water born diseases or malnutrition or other things.
The sad thing is, he continued, is that if he just sold his big screen t.v. he could have saved at least two more African kids in that village by buying them medicine and food. But, he said, he really, really likes his big screen t.v.
So he made us look at our lists again and said, be honest with yourself, put your tv, your education, your material things above the Africans because that is the reality.
He told us to continue to watch our t.vs or play on our computers, as he does, but don't kid ourselves about our priorities.
His point wasn't to guilt us into selling all of our stuff, because he said it's a hard thing to do; his point was merely to show us how it is our actions and lifestyles that reflect our true values, not what we like to tell ourselves to make ourselves feel good.

I've been thinking about this and trying to figure out what my real values are and how I can start reflecting them through my actions.

Just a thought...