musings on following your bliss

A few nights ago, I had a conversation with one of the guys here. He’s 32, tall lanky guy with an outdoorsy look. He also looks like a carpenter, which he kind of is, although had gone to school to be an architect. He asked me what I was thinking about doing for finding work, and I started going into my thinking and struggles, thinking about leaving architecture behind like I’ve left music behind. His response was condoning and encouraging going off in a completely different direction and following one's bliss. Standard young, liberal reaction.

I asked him about his story, what kind of major change he had gone through, and he relayed how he had a minor meltdown at the end of architecture school, decided he didn’t want to work in architecture after school. He moved out to Vermont to be with his girlfriend, work as a carpenter, be outside, healthy, and just alive again. Architecture school can do that to you, kill you in bits and pieces.

We talked about Parents. He had some real tension with his father because his dad wanted him to go forward with schooling and being an engineer. He decided to go to architecture school, but after that, he went skiing and mountain climbing. His father, surely worried but also made uncomfortable by his son’s independence and questioning, demanded the son come back to reality. The son, of course, refused, and there was a rift which was eventually healed between father and son. The son’s take on it is that if these people want you to be someone they want, then what are they to you? Are they people who want to see you grow and be happy, discover and move forward? Or are they people who want to control you and see you do what they want you to do? This is one of the central questions in my life.

Additional questions I have are do your parents have the right to demand that you be someone they want you to be? Do you have a responsibility to them, and where does that responsibility start or stop? At what point in your life does what your parents want from you stop being your responsibility? At what point does that relationship between you and your parents become one where the love is purified and the playing field levels out - in other words, neither party has responsibility towards the other, and the relationship is based on wanting to help each other, not being required to help?

Going back to following your bliss - If you step out and become something else, do something different and follow your own drum, my perception of what would happen is that you’d find yourself alone. What this guy reminded me is that while you’d be alone maybe for a little while, you’d be finding other people who were interested in what you were doing. To me, this makes the bedrock relationships that I have even more important. My emotional home.

Day 2-ish in workshop in VT

Even in pretend-land, time moves fast. But definitely in non-straightforward fashion. Yesterday was, again, chock full of activity and motion. In the morning, I was up pretty early, and read a bit, and then drove from the dorms to our working area in Brattleboro with another woman, a grad student in urban planning. She’s 25, recently out of school, working as good industrious people do, trying to find her next job. She seems earnest enough, straightforward enough. Yet, I have a sense of her as being a type. Not so much a person unto herself yet - but that's kind of how it is at the young adult stage. It is starting to get clearer what this truly means, though, self-identity. I think it means that you’ve committed yourself in total down a path of requirement.

What is that? What’s a path of requirement? In the past, you’ve been forced to do this and that, you’ve been swayed heavily by the winds of society and culture, and finally, now, you’ve reached a point where you must stand up on your own. You must work. You don’t necessarily want to do all the things required of you, but you will, and you actively do now. At that point, standing up on your own means nothing so much as making that decision, and deciding on your terms what you will do to stand, unbowed. And then, you do. And keep doing because you've made a commitment, and you must.

This is critical for people seeking a path, the Seekers. Parents can weigh like millstones around a young sapling’s neck, making it difficult to seek light and air. To continue the metaphor, if the field of saplings is close, other saplings crowd your branches, making if hard for you to grow straight and true. We are not trees, however, but moving, metamorphosizing people. That ought to be a word, metamorphose, -ing or –phosizing.

Anyway, snippets of thoughts from Vermont.

creative genius?

This girl is unbelievably good.

Wasps

Life is profoundly unfair. Perhaps where humans are most different from the other animals is how we (some of us anyway) feel a distinct irony in the fact that collectively, we want everything to be fair and rosy, but in fact, life requires that we perform differently.

I tend to leave my lawn, the borders, and trimmings fairly untended, happy to leave it to the wild things. Every now and then, however, I'm struck by an impulse, a first cousin to the desires of frontier women to dress up their humble stick and mud abodes with lace curtains. My impulse drags me to garden, to try and make order out of the imperturbable chaos that is Nature. Silly me. But so it is, and so I venture to pull out weeds that I have no sense of, as a bulldozer to a primeval forest. Suddenly, thwack! - into the poison oak and a nest of ground wasps!

Must kill (innocent) wasps, and tear out threatening poison oak (a relatively pretty looking plant that suddenly takes on a wicked witch like cast)!

I pick up the pesticide and gird myself to dig out the poison oak. This mundane suburban vignette illuminates a human irony. For what has the wasp done but try and build a home? What has the poison oak done but what all plants do at all times - live and grow? Suddenly, strangely, the actions of all who have come before make some sense - killing, maiming, tearing down, destruction....all in the name of some ideal or other, but at the end, it is a fear and a desire to control. And yet, we all wish fervently for peace, harmony, and an end to struggling and strife. That’s what we all profess to want. We can’t have it. We are not in Eden, but cast outside of it, and while our hearts were formed in Paradise and we retain so many paradisical yearnings, Paradise is not where we live. We live on earth, grimy, wasp-ridden, poison oak-bearing, lovely earth.

What do we do with such knowledge? It can be enough to make people crazy – I think it does, quietly, and often, not so quietly. I see it when I look into people’s eyes sometimes, at the checkout counters, in the streets. People go about their proscribed lives, knowing from the bottom of their soles/souls, that the borders of their lives are identical to those of soap bubbles.

What would you teach your children, knowing that this world they go into is as much soap bubbles as it is milk, honey, asphalt, steel, gold, and terror?