After punching your weight with a strong New Year enthusiasm, there would be creeps of distraction, lack of focus, discipline and maybe self-punishing thoughts. Plainly, it is the resistance. Businesses take advantage of this—a common theme from the fitness gym industry:
Gyms take advantage of New Year’s resolutions to rope newbies into year-long contracts, knowing full well they’ll only use two weeks’ worth of them.
Ouch.
We are now in the second week of the year. The Eagles stretched themselves while exploring further about being a Survivor. Resistance crept into the studios in different ways. Here, I will share the Eagle’s journey and the various resistance they faced, ending with the meaning of resistance.
Highlights Challenges:
- Intentionality Crumbling in the ES Studio
- First Rock Climbing & Birthday Celebrations
- Survivor Quest: Fire, Water & More food
- Independence at Home, Around & Identity
- More about Resistance
Intentionality Crumbling in the ES Studio
The Elementary School (ES) Eagle’s intentionality has been crumbling. They had been getting distracted, lost focus, and sometimes entirely chaotic. The consequence? Their Fun Friday was canceled and discussions led to new studio experiments to bring back order. Three were tested this week: intentionality buddy, Ms. Caryn took away some freedom and testing a noise level tracker.
Intentionality Buddy is another name for running partner. Basically, a peer that keep check of their work. Uma took charge and organized intentionality buddies by pairing Eagles up.
Here’s the manual version of Yacker Tracker, currently monitored by Kimaya.
With all these experiments, intentionality still fractured, especially by late morning. Claims of “sugar rush”, or various form of reasons permeated the studios. There were thousands of reasons one could still create, but these are just resistance manifesting itself. There’s still more experiments ahead, but until the ES Eagles truly decide to be captain of their ship, these issues will re-surfaced, again and again.
You might ask, why don’t Guides step in and be a disciplinarian? Our goal is not to have Eagles being intentional while they are at school. Instead, our goal is that they find understanding through natural consequences and experiences. There were meant to be times like this. The bright side is that Eagles were continuously asking themselves: How do we improve intentionality? How do we keep ourselves accountable? What else can we try? Some of the suggestions from the Eagles were quite serious, such as shutting down the ES studio, no free time and so on. So, the story of continuously finding their ground will continue, likely for a while.
This is the experience and battle against resistance, at a studio level.
The Middle School (MS) Eagles were better, with the exception of a messy outdoor area. Fortunately, their motivation of work has been on high gear because of the caveman motivation: fire & food. More on this later.
Let’s come back to the ES Eagles. It was not all chaotic; there were some major highlights too.
First Rock Climbing & Birthday Celebrations
Last year, the Eagles chose rock climbing as the next Sports activity (last 2 Sprints, they did swimming). So, we organized rock climbing course with Camp 5, just five minutes from Acton Academy KL.
This was the first time for many of them. Naturally, it’s a stretch. Belaying, knots, harness, carabiners, climbing tracks, and most important of all, gravity! Life in Acton Academy is about embracing challenges and conquering fear, with lots of fun :))
“Best PE ever!”
“I was so scared when I was up there but I did it!!!”
During mid-week, we also had a Birthday Celebration for Ayub. In the traditional ritual of Acton Academy, Auntie Laila shared the highlights of Ayub’s eight-full-years of life. Welcome to the 9 years old club!
Survivor Quest: Water, Fire & More food
Last week, the Eagles explored food. The reality is that you can survive 3 weeks without food, but only 3–5 days without water. Moreover, water is also the source of most disease—the second wave of casualties in the 2004 Tsunami was due to water contamination. So, water knowledge is crucial for any survival.
This week, the Eagles explored water in many ways: the water cycle, how to filter water, and creating clouds in the bottle. Meanwhile, the MS Eagles explored backwoods cooking (cooking using natural ingredients, without modern utensils) and honed their fire making skills.
Water: the Water Cycle
First, the “why” of water. Eagles studied this Water Cycle chart carefully and worked on various online interactive tools and videos. There were discussions as among the ES and MS Eagles as they researched online.
Apsara, one of the older ES Eagles brought a water cycle model to share with other Eagles. The Eagles learned about condensation, sublimation, evaporation, run-off, etc. in her presentation.
But what intrigued the Eagles more was: How do you make it? Later, the discussion turned into an arts and crafts class.
Water: Cloud on the Bottle
How are clouds formed? How did you learn the concept of condensation? Instead of theory, the Eagles actually made clouds!
“I thought we were actually grabbing a cloud from the air and putting it in a bottle! Now I know how to make a cloud at home.”
To learn more about this experiment, you can check out this page.
Water: Filtration
There’s plenty of water in wet and humid Malaysia. The question is: Can you find fresh drinking water?
The Eagles explored filtration with different combinations of sand, pebbles, leaves, coffee filters and so on. There was an air of humming fun engagement as they made lots of trials and competed to get the clearest water.
There’s also obtaining water via solar sails. Alas, the weather this week had been too wet!
Food & Fire
Back to the MS Eagles and their current endeavor with food & fire. They had been working hard to qualify for their Fun Friday and also get more time for outdoor activities. Many of them did work at home so that they could do things. Doing thing such as:
Chopping bamboo and bringing them back:
Trimming and cutting bamboo:
Practicing lashings. One Eagle teaching another how to make square lashing:
Making pioneering projects where they learned tripod lashings.
Cooking bread
Cooking chicken kebab
Cutting coconut
Cooking rice in bamboo
Cooking rice in coconut, which didn’t work out (yet).
MS Eagles were literally making fire. Like I said, caveman motivation 😛
Independence at Home, Around and Identity
The Home Challenges that was introduced last week continued. Now, the ES Eagles also started making beds, preparing their lunch and even doing a car wash! Here are some of the many photos parents have shared in the community chat group.
The MS Eagles pushed their independence further, by planning and taking public transport to different destinations. This was a new experience for many of them.
At each stage, you could hear the excitement and also reservations. Reservation to go ahead and ask a question, reservation to trust your gut and move forward, reservation to take the lead. Reservations = resistance. We were glad that their motivations took the better part, so they were forging ahead with the courage to grow.
You might wonder, where does all this lead to? The aim is not about doing more, achieving more or being capable more. The ultimate aim is the secret ingredient within our Survivor Quest, which is the search of the identity—to become who you are truly meant to be. We started this week by exploring 5 Love Languages. During the next few weeks, the Eagles will discover more about themselves, in the form of personality and mapping. There will be more resistance ahead.
Why Identity? I will quote Friedrich Nietzsche.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
The Why is the Identity. It takes courage, love, sacrifice and the willingness to dig deep to search it. It is the way, the only way to overcome resistance.
More about Resistance
So, what exactly is resistance?
Resistance happens when you are not fully accepting what is happening, so your body and mind creates various schemes of thinking, behaviors, and excuses to stop you from progressing further.
It can manifest in many forms: self-doubt, overthinking, not knowing where to start, questioning your purpose, fear and so on. Naturally, for most, the easiest way of getting out is to distract oneself.
Steven Pressfield spent one entire year contemplating this and wrote The War of Art. I highly recommend it. Here’s a free version.
Resistance cannot be ignored. It is part of the Hero’s Journey. Overcome it, you create art from your inner soul and become who you are meant to be. Succumb to it, it drags your greatest dreams to the darkest pit.
So, is there resistance right now? What are you going to do about it?
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