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.