Me again. I took Friday and Saturday off from the hard self-reflection thinking so I'd have fresh eyes today. I wonder if I'm a horrible person for feeling that the writing process is not energizing, but, rather, ennervating.
This application process is teaching me how it feels to be rusty. I mean rusted out rusty. There was a time when math was second nature and writing 20 pages in a night was a feat, but not an impossible one.
The sort of writing I do for work is nothing compared to the creative, analytical stuff I had to write in high school and college. It's only been five and a half years since I graduated, and for some reason, I find it difficult to write from a place inside of me that cares about the outside world. That place has become a private sanctuary, a haven that I go to when I'm pulling weeds out back or making time to cook a meal from scratch.
Work is public passion. Work is someone else's mission-driven passion. Don't get me wrong -- I like working for a cause I care about. Caring about a cause and working on someone else's mission, though, is an inherited exercise in self-righteousness for the gluttonous. Although $ isn't plentiful in my line of work, I get commended all the time for the work I do, and for the fact that I care about something enough to devote my life's work to it. All the time. On some level, I think folks commend because it's a natural continuation of the conversation. So I've gotten used to being commended, and for appearing to be passionate, and have gotten quite lazy about remembering why I joined in the first place. What did I care about then? What do I care about now?
I think it's OK to want to help. A lot of causes are starved for volunteers, and if you are one, you often get a lot of your commendations up front for just having raised your hand. So one's focus shifts from believing in something, or just being willing to help, to doing the work not only because it needs to be done, but because it is commendable work. In the absence of one's own mission, this feels fine.
But now, when I'm asked what matters most and why, I'm challenged to remember, and to separate my mission from the work I do. Me personally, I care about my family and friends, of course. I care about their psychological well-being, that they're pursuing their dreams, that they're not being taken advantage of. I care about the health of their credit. But then, I care about little stuff that matters to a very few people. I care about how words shape our consciousness and our lot in life: how written history becomes a permanent record and trumps the oral past. I care about making sure my dreams for the future are the right ones, and not just the ones I'm pursuing because I think it's the right thing to do. For me, it's important to live without regret, which I think can be done by always being your own person no matter who you're with and making choices that are good in concert with others and that can stand on their own, too.
Each day is a gift; each sunrise is an opportunity to do something more than you've done, to have permission to do something else than you've done, to figure things out. My philosophy, if it can be called that, is to weigh choices against the fact that you could always be hit by a bus tomorrow, so you should be satisfied that the choices you made today are ones you can live with for the rest of your life, be that life long or short.
