Getting to "More"

The other day someone shared with me that we reached the marker of 100 days in Portland. For some reason I thought that the warp speed at which a year goes by only applied to years in college, but I'm finding that it applies to a year of service, too! Realizing that my time in this year is already a quarter of the way over, I thought to reflect on what my service has meant so far. I noticed that I've been in a struggle to determine how I will add to my service placement, and in a struggle to quantify the "more".

I've always been the type of person who constantly strives to do more. This mindset is a large part of why I chose to spend a year in service with JVC Northwest in the first place. When I arrived at my service placement in August to find that the Education Center I was to spend the year at was in a “rebuilding phase”, I eagerly got to work on determining how I could add more to the program. In my first month of service I diligently filled my free time researching potential partner organizations and emailing prospective volunteers. I was determined to fill the then unscheduled afternoons in the Education Center with coding workshops and college prep, arts & crafts activities and book club discussions. I envisioned a vibrant and enthusiastic community growing out of our cozy space in the midst of downtown Portland.

As it turns out, life doesn’t always match up with the picture of it that you create in your head. On several occasions, youth arrived on an afternoon when I had planned an activity only to want some quiet time for reading and relaxing instead. And sometimes no one arrived to carry out my plans at all. Frustration began to creep up on me. I’m doing more, aren’t I? So why isn’t it working?

As I took a step back to consider what I was missing, I was reminded of a discussion I had about the Ignatian concept of “magis” during my senior year of college. The literal translation of the Latin word means “more” or “greater”, which can often lead to the misconception–all too popular within our culture already–that to do more is to do better. This is the trope I was stuck in as I relentlessly sought to do more at the Education Center. But when I thought back to that conversation, I remembered that we talked about “magis” not necessarily as about doing more, but about being more. At the time of the conversation, a time when I was hyper-focused on what I was going to do with my life after undergrad, that perspective challenged me to instead consider a much greater question: how was I going to be?

In its truest form, at least as I understand it, magis isn’t about striving but about opening–opening oneself and one’s heart to all that already is. Getting to “greater” might be as simple as tuning in to the things around us that we usually miss and noticing all the greatness to be found within them, just as they are.

I think my quest to do more was, in an unconscious way, a form of centering myself in the work that I'm doing. School rewarded me for striving and achieving, but service isn't really about either of those things.

As I move forward with my year in the Education Center (the three quarters I have left of it), even as I contribute to the rebuilding of the program, I am shifting my focus from what we are going to do, to how we as a program and I as an individual are going to be. I am leaning into being more attentive, being more welcoming, and being there for people exactly where they are, just as they are.