Letter to future self/ future peer

In this Lesson, we would like to invite you to write a letter to your future self or to a future peer (e.g. who may be less experienced than you), and offer as a gift to that person your wisdom and inspiration on care-full scholarship. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are with care-full scholarship, because this letter is not about sharing specific competences or strategies. The important thing is to:

• Connect with one’s own sense of purpose;
• Access a place of wisdom and self-appreciation and care and (re-)become aware and grateful for it;
• Exercise with gift-giving and mentorship.

The letter can be something you keep for yourself, or it can also be something you will share (e.g. read out loud) with a trusted peer (not the one you are writing the letter to, but anyone you wish to share your thoughts with, perhaps from the MOOC Community of Practice).

Guided steps:

1)    Decide whether the recipient of the letter will be yourself in the future (5 or 10 years from now) or another younger scholar or practitioner – it can be someone you know, but also just someone abstract;

2)    Find a nice piece of paper and pen, something you would use to write a letter to a person dear to you or print off our Unit 4 template via the files tab;

3)    Find yourself a quiet and comfortable place, where you can concentrate on writing for the next 10-20 minutes or so;

4)    Remember: the letter draws from your past and present experience, but is forward-looking, and aims to inform the future practice and attitude of the person you are writing to! Drawing from your wisdom, you are advising her/him/them on future actions, feelings, and resources - and offering them as a gift;

5)    Before starting to write, think of the following questions:

• Looking at your own idea and practicing of care-full scholarship, what practices are really important and nurturing for you?
• Who has been supporting you in your care-full path? Whose support would you have loved to have or would you like to access in the future? (including e.g. objects/courses/people/natural elements…)
• What feelings have you experienced or do you imagine experiencing when embarking on one or more of the realms of care-full scholarship (including those you might have been less comfortable with previously in a professional setting, yet you now know they are OK to experience)? Which ones give you a deep sense of purpose and value?

6)    Write the letter trying to answer the three questions above, in no particular order. One or two pages will suffice.

Meta-reflection:

This exercise is inspired by several sources: the Re.imaginary database of creative and visioning methods, the book ‘A Velocity of Being: Letters to a young reader’, and the manual of Appreciative Inquiry ‘The positive path’. It can be adapted to a lot of different uses... try this method, or different adaptations of it, with your students or in your practice and let us know how it went!