Commitment October 18, 2009

In my dream, I am in the desert, climbing sand dune cliffs with a partner. I begin to slip as the sand crumbles away beneath my feet, and I consider throwing my weight forward or grabbing onto a rock, but I don’t. Instead I let myself fall as my partner looks on, surprised, intrigued. I watch the mineral strata marking the side of the cliff blur before my eyes as I descend. My feet hit against something nearly solid and I grab onto it with my hands, catching myself on a ledge about five feet from the ground. “Well, are you coming back up?” my partner asks. I look beneath me, then above. The ground is so much closer than the top of the climb…

Someone said to me recently: “You’re never going to succeed at something if you’re not really committed to it.” That line has been etched in my mind ever since. I never really thought of myself as having commitment issues (like the cliché of men in relationships), but it does seem to follow naturally from indecisiveness. Another friend sent me an article back in May that was published in EYE WEEKLY, a free weekly newspaper in Toronto, which asserted that modern twentysomethings “can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.” Essentially, we are paralyzed in the face of an excess of freedom that leaves us unable to commit to any one outcome, because in making that choice we would be destroying all the other possibilities. We want to make sure that what we choose is really the best option, but with near-infinite options, won’t there always be one that seems better?

I struggle with this a lot.

And I wonder if I’m going into teacher school with the wrong sort of attitude. Most of the time, the sorts of thoughts going through my head are, “Is this really where I should be? Will I really be any good at this? Will I really enjoy this? Is this career the best fit for my personality? If grad school is stressing me out this much, how on earth am I going to handle teaching? And what am I doing spending so much money on grad school when odds are I’m going to have to sub for years before I get an actual teaching job anyway? I just have to make it through this semester, then student teaching next semester. Then just two courses in the summer and I’ll be certified, and if I don’t want to keep going for the masters I don’t have to.” There are other days, though, when I feel excited about teaching and start to think that I could really do this. But I’m so easily discouraged. There is so much that I’m worried about. I don’t like the idea of being so much a part of The System, and having to jump through all the ridiculous hoops of grad school, which it seems continue into the profession as well. (Am I being unrealistic, though? Will any job be like that? Am I struggling more with grad school, with teaching, or with adulthood in general?) I don’t feel capable of devoting my entire life to a profession at the age of twenty-three. I’m not ready for this yet.

Essentially, I’m not 100% committed to this teacher school decision at this point in my life. Would I have a better chance of succeeding if I could somehow foster a conviction within me that this is where I am absolutely meant to be, and that this what I want above all else? Probably. But I’m not too keen on self-brainwashing. Is commitment something that has to be forced, or should it just come naturally when I find where I’m meant to be? And what does “meant to be” mean? Am I implying that I believe in fate? I don’t think I do, exactly… I don’t believe in predestination, but I would like to believe that there is a kind of natural order to things. “Would like to believe” ≠ “believe unconditionally,” but it is a basis I can go on until proven otherwise.

What is the nature of commitment for you?

Should I keep seeking my ideal career, or should I just “grow up and get a job”?

Suggestions welcome.

Saying Goodbye August 8, 2009

As a kind of closing post for the JVC chapter of my life, I thought I’d give you a few excerpts from my journal that I might have posted earlier in the year but just never did. Enjoy!

Friday, September 5, 2008

I believe I am learning that life requires courage—not just the lives of heroes and soldiers and world leaders, but everyone’s life, including my own. Life demands courage in everyday things. It isn’t the courage of martyrdom; it exists on a much smaller scale: it’s the courage to pick up the phone and make a call you’ve been dreading, or start a conversation with a stranger, or stand up for your principles when they’re not popular, or start a new job or move to a new place or try a new recipe or admit that you’re wrong. Life requires courage from me, and I want to live courageously. Sometimes this means that I have to force myself to do daunting things that I don’t particularly want to do. I have to face the fact that a lot of things worth doing in life aren’t necessarily going to be things I am absolutely thrilled about—I’m going to be anxious and apprehensive going into them. Making decisions and getting things started demands a good deal of courage, and then there comes a point where I realize that I CAN do it, I’ve left my fears far behind me, and it is very much worth it.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

I wish I had a quest—a quest like Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter. I want a quest for something besides self-improvement, its success measured in something beyond my own happiness. I want to destroy the ring and take down the evil Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort to save the world, and I want to bring my friends with me—my Samwise Gamgee, my Han and Leia and R2-D2 and C-3PO, my Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. I don’t want to have to be happy about what I’m doing; I want it to be okay to be scared and miserable but press on anyway because I have to, because it must be done and I’m the one who has to do it. I want something to live for, that is real and concrete and unquestionably worthwhile, beyond my own personal happiness.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Tonight I felt the urge for motion, the desire to lose myself in a sea of other people and just feel a part of this seething humanity for a while. Courtney and Lorraine are my only roommates left right now, and neither of them wanted to go out—so I ended up going out by myself and wandering up and down Valencia. I didn’t work up the nerve to go into any bars or coffee shops, but I did stop to peruse a cute independent bookstore called Dog-Eared Books. There were hand-written notes on many of the shelves explaining the organizing system and pointing customers toward specific authors. Out on the street I was stopped by a man and a woman who had been robbed and just needed $7 for the bus to Santa Rosa. “No one will help us!” he said, distressed. “Everyone thinks we’re bums!” I dug through my purse to find my wallet with my gloves on and pulled out a five-dollar bill; they thanked me and walked off to find the last two dollars. Did I believe their story? Yes. …Well, maybe. Why hadn’t I given them seven? I had it on me, and it wouldn’t have meant starvation by any means. I don’t know why I only gave them five. Maybe if I’d given them more it would have meant that I owed everyone else who asked me the same amount of money. Maybe I’m just a stingy bastard. Who knows, really?

I am twenty-two years old and my life is directionless and I have no friends my age in San Francisco aside from my roommates, and I am just beginning to begin to understand the world and my place in it. My experience is so small, when held up against all that has been lived. I want to live it all—I want to fill the skin of each person I see and feel what it is to live their lives, and take a look at my word through different eyes. I want to be shocked and disturbed and saddened and touched and inspired, and I want to know. I want to put all of that knowledge together so that we can begin to make some sense out of this crazy life-thing.

I am twenty-two years old and I am sitting Indian-style in the middle of the living room floor with pieces and scraps of experience spread out all around me like Tinker Toys, trying to figure out how to assemble them into this solid, cohesive thing called a life. I’m at a loss for where to start, and I seem to have misplaced the instructions.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

The real reason I started crying during A Muppet Christmas Carol [true story, by the way, and to my knowledge this is the only movie I have ever actually cried while watching] is the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Future is showing Scrooge the following Christmas at the Cratchit house, after Tiny Tim has died. They show his empty place at the table and his crutch by the fireplace and his whole family trying not to cry so they can hold each other together and it’s just so fucking sad… Losing a child, or any family member, has to be just about the most painful thing in the world. But then Scrooge realizes that he can change things, that he has a second chance at life! And Tiny Tim lives! And Scrooge is a new man, and everyone is whole and full of love once again.

It’s a wonderful story—which brings to mind It’s a Wonderful Life, another classic Christmas tale. I haven’t actually watched it in years, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but basically George Bailey loses a lot of money and it looks like he will have to close his business, so he gets really depressed and wishes he’d never been born. Then—poof!—it comes true, and then everything gets even more horribly depressing as we see how bleak his town would be without him. But in the end he is able to unwish his wish; he is reunited with his family and now thoroughly appreciates the life he has.

Why do we love these stories so much? Because they bring us so close to the edge of death and total collapse, and then they pull us back from the precipice of the abyss to where we were before, only we appreciate it so much more because we have been so changed by having faced terrible things and been snatched back from them at the last minute. Redemption narratives. As Teresa’s friend Eron said, life is made up of redemption narratives. Maybe that’s why these stories are so timeless: in dealing with the interplay between life and death, they reflect something essential about the human condition.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

I’ve been skeptical of hope for a long time, since it’s kind of like a drug: gets you high for a while but there’s always the inevitable letdown, as very few things in life can meet the expectations of an idealist. Hope isn’t a lasting source of happiness because I’m just setting myself up for disappointment; therefore I haven’t seen a whole lot of value to it.

But then I started to think about it differently, based partly on points that other people made when I talked to them.

Maybe hope doesn’t bring lasting happiness, but what does, really? That’s just not the way life works. Happiness never lasts, but sadness doesn’t either. Everything is a cycle. …So why not just live accepting that? (I asked myself.) …Acknowledging that sadness and happiness come and go no matter what, and you can’t have one without the other?

So maybe the object of hope is not what determines whether or not hope is worthwhile. (To a certain degree, I mean. This doesn’t extend to being completely delusional. Not because it fits with my theory; just because I can’t buy the value of hope that totally obscures some crucial aspect of reality. Example [spoiler warning for Cider House Rules]: whatever hope the orphans gained from Homer’s coverup of Fuzzy’s death in Cider House Rules.) Even if the thing hoped for never comes to be, maybe that hope is worthwhile regardless. I am at my happiest when I have hope: I love more easily and live more fearlessly and tap into forgotten stores of enthusiasm and motivation. Maybe hope really is good in itself–maybe it’s okay to throw myself into it wholeheartedly without focusing solely on the eventual outcome.

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So it’s 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, and I’m leaving for the airport in about eight hours. No matter how long I have to prepare myself for endings, I am never, ever ready. I’ve known that August 7 is my last day of work for over a year, and yet it still managed to creep up on me… and I basically knew for my whole life that I was planning to graduate from college in June 2008, but that one caught me by surprise as well. One friend I mentioned this to suggested that it’s because I don’t detach—I stay fully present and try to make the most of where I am right up to the bitter end. I think that might be giving me too much credit (the explanation I had in mind was more along the lines of “denial”), but if that’s part of the reason endings catch me off-guard, I’ll take it.

What bothers me the most about leaving are the remaining things I still want to do here but haven’t had a chance to, and the people I haven’t said goodbye to. I never made it to Alcatraz, for instance, and I never went to Yosemite or swam in the ocean (albeit for a good reason—it is FREEZING!). These are all things I’d been meaning to do, but time just crept up on me. On the bright side, unfinished business is all the more reason to come back someday. Goodbyes, though, are strange. I no longer try to drag them out as long as humanly possible—a change which other people seem to appreciate—and instead, I seem to be becoming a quick goodbye person. Part of me knows that leaving is the hardest part, and once I’m gone things will be okay, so I kind of just want to get the leaving over with. (Sometimes I think I miss people more before they leave than when they’re actually gone.) But that doesn’t mean that saying goodbye is less important for me. Even if it takes five seconds, I feel immeasurably better having said goodbye to someone than not.

So for now, I will miss you, San Francisco, and I will miss you, Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I will miss every inch of this apartment, the freak show that is 16th and Mission, and everything that drove me nuts this year. I have eight more hours to sit here with my goodbyes, and then I’m going to try to make my peace with this.

Departure May 14, 2009

On the Thursday afternoon we got back from silent retreat, Julie and I were standing in the checkout line at Rainbow Grocery when she got a call from her supervisor.  I stood idly examining things on the shelves until Julie kicked me and mouthed “Sarah just got laid off.”  She went outside to talk on the phone and I finished buying the groceries before going out to find out what the heck had happened.  She told me that six of our coworkers had been laid off on Wednesday—Sarah the only attorney, along with our receptionist, office manager, communications coordinator, development director, and asylum paralegal.  I called my supervisor when we got back to the apartment, and she took us out to dinner that night to talk things over with us.  We were basically in shock and couldn’t understand how anything could function with a third of the office gone.  (I still don’t have an answer for that.)

The whole experience distinctly reminded me of when my dad got laid off from Kodak in November 2001.  The aftermath of layoffs had lost its immediacy after all these years, and I’d forgotten just how much they suck.  It was hard going into work on Friday and seeing a couple of the people who’d lost their jobs, and knowing that I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to so many.  I’m starting to think that closure is a myth of modern life.  I don’t think the extent of the whole “economic downturn” thing had quite hit home for me until Thursday, either.  It reminds me that nothing is stable, that security is an illusion, that people’s worlds can change without a moment’s notice… that everything ends and that endings often come before we’re prepared for them.  The ideal, I think, is to spend my whole life saying goodbye—to spend it appreciating everything to the fullest extent possible and recognizing that each moment is totally inimitable and will never be lived again: to live in a constant state of arrival and departure.

Some musings… November 19, 2008

One of the things I’m liking best about this year so far is that it’s been forcing me to think about things.  A large part of what I want to accomplish this year is to make steps toward “figuring things out,” which is a nice, vague concept that essentially involves trying to develop somewhat cohesive ideas about life.  One would think that living wouldn’t be all that complicated—eat, sleep, breathe, work, etc.—but oddly enough, there are a lot of issues that arise in between.  (Shocking, I know.)  So I thought I would treat you to some of the stuff I’ve been mulling over.

Idealism: improvement vs. acceptance.

This is a long-standing issue for me.  As I’ve mentioned before, I consider myself an idealist in that I have (sometimes surprisingly specific) ideas of how I want things to be, and I’m always trying to figure out what I can do to get things to that point.  This is more pronounced for things that relate directly to my life and less pronounced for things that concern the world as a whole.  (Maybe that makes me selfish, but that isn’t the point.)  Okay, so my dilemma is this: If we can only be happy by accepting things as they are, then to what extent should we work to improve the undesirable things in life?  And phrased another way: If we are supposed to learn to love ourselves as we are, then how do we work toward self-improvement?  I can’t get past my conception of the two things as mutually exclusive.  Do you see what I mean?  To what extent do we accept the current state of affairs, and to what extent do we fight for positive change?  Do we just accept what we cannot change, like that quote says?  How do we love ourselves if we only love certain parts of ourselves?  Can we love something the way it is and try to change it at the same time?  It just doesn’t make sense.  I haven’t come up with a solution to this yet.*

The reason that this is such an absorbing issue for me is that it relates directly to what I’m trying to do this year.  This is supposed to be a year of change and personal growth, and some of the ways that I would like to change include becoming more confident and outgoing.  How does one become more confident?  By accepting oneself as one is, or by striving to become what one wants to be?  At some point, confidence has to come from loving yourself.  (Second person is much easier grammatically.)  So should I be trying to love myself as I am, right now, or should I be trying to love myself as I would like to become?  Do I learn to love what I am, or do I learn to be what I love?  I believe in self-improvement; therefore I’m more inclined toward the latter.  And of course, that is where this dilemma arises.  Is it possible to love what is changing—love in motion?  Can the love itself change in parallel?  And this also applies to loving other people, because of course people change.  This train of thought has the potential to get ridiculously long.

Although I have by no means resolved that dilemma, I have come to a few realizations that relate to it.  In the realm of self-improvement, I have a tendency to try to model myself after people I admire—and I have a tremendous capacity for admiration of other people.  There are just so many amazing people in the world.  But recently it’s occurred to me that I haven’t exactly been going about this in the best way.  I tend to assume that unless I precisely emulate these amazing people, I am somehow inferior, and I have the potential to frustrate myself endlessly trying to become things that are just not part of my character.  It dawned on me a few weeks ago that, hey—just because I’m not exactly like someone who is cool, doesn’t mean that I’m not cool in a different way.  (Obvious, yes, but at the same time somehow not.)  Clearly there are myriad ways to be awesome, so there’s no need to beat myself up just because I can’t be awesome in the same way as someone else.

My other realization in the same vein was that not everyone who exudes confidence is worth emulating.  I have a tendency to be taken in by confident people—they say and do everything with such conviction that I assume they must be right, even when I would have disagreed with them.  It occurred to me recently that just because someone is confident about something doesn’t mean that they’re right.  (Again, not always as obvious as it seems when I type it out.)  Half the time these things are subjective anyway, and there’s no need to surrender my opinion for agreement’s sake.

Also along those lines, I’m starting to distinguish between people who are cool because they’re genuinely great to be around and they make everyone around them feel great as well, and people who are “cool” because they exude confidence, but they’re not genuinely open to the people around them and they inspire jealousy more than admiration—they make people feel inferior rather than challenged, inspired, and accepted.

…Ergo, progress :~)

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* I feel like there are two separate but related issues here: accepting vs. changing the world as a whole, and loving vs. improving oneself.  The closest I’ve come to some kind of solution is the idea that we find happiness not necessarily in accepting things as they are at this very moment, but in accepting things as they are on a larger scale—in accepting the transience of moments and the process of change.  Accept the mechanisms and change the specifics within them.  The second issue seems more difficult, for some reason—likely because I’ve substituted ‘loving’ for ‘accepting’.  Acceptance isn’t a particularly difficult concept, but love is insanely complicated.  I’ve never encountered two people who define it the same way.  So the hypothetical solution I was toying with for this end of things was to expand my definition of love, or to revolutionize love itself.  (Am I talking out of my ass?  …That is a distinct possibility.)

Optimism’s a Bitch July 29, 2008

Aside from a brief flirtation back in high school, optimism and I have never been good friends. This isn’t to say that I’m a total cynic, or an emo kid, but I don’t look on the bright side of everything either. It just doesn’t appeal to me as a way to live. They say that pessimists are never disappointed…but if life sucks, then who cares? I see optimists as constantly setting themselves up for disappointment, which they then try to brush aside as soon as it appears. To me, neither of these seems like a terribly fulfilling way to go through life.

I consider myself to be a idealist, albeit a frustrated one. Is this more fulfilling than optimism and pessimism? …Probably not. The upside of idealism is the belief that a better world is possible. The downside of idealism is the acute awareness of the disparity between that world and the world we live in. It sucks if I focus on that part, but I think the way to make it work is to focus on the process of working toward that vision of a better existence…

In summary,

Pessimism: “Life sucks.”

Optimism: “Life’s pretty okay, and it’s going to get better… eventually.”

Idealism: “Life’s not that great—it could be so much better than this.” Or: “Life might not be perfect, but we can work to make it better than this.”