Life can be compared to a vessel filled with different items of varying importance, according to motivational speaker Arlene Jorgenson.
To demonstrate, she placed golf balls, which represent the “big” things such as family, relationships and health, followed by beans and then sand, into an old jar.
Each time she put in a new item, Jorgenson asked the participants at the Manitoba Farm Women’s Conference in Portage la Prairie last week whether they thought the container was full.
“Is it full now?” she asked. “The medium-sized stuff represents volunteering and committees. The sand represents the small stuff: having a perfect outfit, great shoes, candles that match our tablecloths.”
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Finally, Jorgenson pointed out the gist of the analogy: that if she had placed the smaller items in the jar first, there would have been no room for the other stuff.
“That’s what we do in our lives sometimes. We concentrate too much on the small stuff. Then we get into trouble because there is not enough room for the big stuff such as our health, relationships and family. Those are the things that get shortchanged in our lives.”
But even when the jar looked full, she showed how there was still room for a familiar dark brown liquid.
“The analogy is that there is always room for a cup of coffee with friends,” she said.
Jorgenson, a businesswoman with a background in occupational health who grew up in rural Saskatchewan, said strong women provide the backbone of strong communities.
“Yes, there is a lot of change in the world, but a lot has stayed the same,” she said.
“Our values are the same: for example, the things that we hold dear, such as the legacy of agriculture and our family farms, community values and our heritage. Those are the things that we need to pull forward.”
Like the Amazon walking tree, which puts down new roots, then lets go of old ones as it moves slowly toward the light, rural women must embrace change while constantly clarifying their focus on the things that matter.
“It’s not enough to say that farming has changed, and ‘woe is me.’ We have to be very clear about what our purpose and compelling motivator is.”
Jorgenson noted that as people become more interested in sustainable futures, much discussion is taking place about the reasons why some communities thrive and others fade away.
“How do you stir that up? You stir that up by getting people with positive ideas and entrepreneurial spirit and that driving force together so that they see that we can build toward the future,” she said.
The volunteers who sustain a rural community’s seasonal rituals must recognize their own importance, and the value of what they do, Jorgenson added. Food naturally provides the focus for community events, whether they are organized to celebrate, grieve or plan for the future.
“Farm women have to recognize that they are the heart of the home and the heart of the community. All of the morale building in the community centres around the women’s work. If there’s a fowl supper, or a hockey banquet, who is it that does that?”
As a motivational speaker, Jorgenson sees her role as reminding people of the things that they already know.
“In our hurry-scurry kind of life, we can get really busy and fragmented. We can get caught up in the busyness of making a living. That’s my job, to remind them of what’s important. That the work they do in the community is important and valuable and that they need to keep on doing it.”
