Our Stories

As I close my eyes and drift away to a land where there is love, health, peace, and blessings. I wanted to take the time to think and reflect.

     I became interested in the value of personal stories when I began to reflect upon my own life experiences. The experiences. My reactions to events, and what I had learned. In other words taking the time to reflect on experiences. I then became more interested in personal stories when I heard, listened, and read personal stories of others. The struggles, adversities, and how strategies were found internally and externally to push forward, to continue through the paths of life. As I continue to read, learn, reflect; I continue to place a high value upon personal narratives. But I also learned that our experiences are not seen as worth much at the undergraduate level, where the emphasis is placed upon learning what is already written, providing evidence, and thoughts that are backed with other writers. There is some room to add your own stories, as long as these can be contextualized, with what is being learned. This process continues throughout the acquisition of knowledge, or through life learning. In other words this is a process. We are building knowledge. Little by little. Building upon what already exists, and to really grasp and be able to contribute, it is important to know what was written previously, authors, and points of history as well.

     As we go through academia, we also realize the importance of personal stories, experiences, for the process of research collection, and data. Its really quite exciting because previously we had to back up life stores. Now we have an opportunity to hear, listen to stories, and call this a process of the collection of raw data. Raw data / primary research is collected, refined, and produced. For research purposes this is considered as treasure. It is an integral process as to how the scientific community contributes to the bodies of knowledge. While of course this is a slow process, social scientists have an obligation, a responsibility to use what is known, unknown, to try to improve the human condition.

     We see this through processes of improvements in healthcare, education practices, buildings, architecture, infrastructures, conservations, ergonomically designed products, eHealth, information Communication Technologies, and so on. With these progressions, especially technologies, other fields or advancements may not be able to keep up with the pace of technological innovations. The positives are that technological advancements have been created, but because of the fast pace, it is really unknown as to how there will be benefits. This point allows us to go back to the value of our stories. We can only, truly know the effect of an invention, or a finding through a study, through the personal stories that are collected.

​My thoughts to share with love & kindness! :)
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Notes: These thoughts were originally hand written on September 26th, 2018. Image 1 - Web Link