Carpe Diem

The question of what I want to be when I grow up -- I play with it, I speak about it, I plan for it, I have no idea about it, I sneeze at it, I cry over it. It's a big question and thinking about its answer makes me both intensely impassioned and profoundly afraid.

Tonight I watched The Dead Poets Society for the first time in a long time. Something about John Keating resonates with me so so fiercely. He's so close to what I want to be. But in real life, he'd have 6 classes and 180 students and curriculums mandated and enforced by law. He'd have heaps of papers to grade and so little time and energy to devote to building relationships with individual students -- the kind of relationships he had in the movie -- ones that speak to the heart of a person and call on their deepest, most creative and true and valuable self. Passionate as he may be about that part of his job, real life Mr. Keating would most likely only be able to make his passion a subordinate thing to his job.

I guess I say that because I fear that for myself. I know life isn't always romantic and I know doing things you would rather not is a big part of leading any kind of life as a human being, great or not. But I don't want to do anything that merely incorporates what I'm passionate about into it. I want what I'm passionate about to be the biggest part of whatever I do.

I'm impatient, yes. But I trust my future will be abnormal to the extent that I have a hard time sitting back and believing something will just come along. I think I'm going to have to find my life's work. Create it. And I just don't feel creative enough. Or maybe the problem is that the world is not currently catering to the creativity of people like me. The world's axioms are so strong and so greatly in opposition to mine that I can feel its disapproving gaze in the supposedly-but-not-so-private room where my ideas churn and even in the birth of those ideas I can already taste failure.

Still... the impassioned part of me won't be still. It's writhing around inside of me like a million woodland creatures just awakened from a long hibernation, full of new life and ambition and purpose that cannot be sequestered by any means.

 

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

                              -Walt Whitman