Usually, all we get is a
glimmer. A story we read or someone we briefly met. A curiosity. A meek voice
inside, whispering. It's up to us to hammer out the rest.
-Po Bronson, What Should I Do With My Life?
I’m at a crossroads in
life. One of those times when you are stopped in your tracks and find yourself
suddenly without direction. The road where you came from is not an option -
that much you know for sure. There are plenty of side roads, and it’s possible
that they could loop back to where you need to go, but they feel like escapes.
Distractions. The trouble is that the road ahead - your only real way forward -
has not been constructed yet. There may be a few trampled weeds hinting
at the shadow of a path, but for the most part, you’re on your own. If you want
to get where you’re going, you’re going to have to build it from scratch. And
that is a paralyzing thought.
I don’t believe we have
to be one thing when we grow up, but that doesn’t make being thirty and
directionless any easier. I didn’t go to school for medicine, or law, or
engineering, which in many ways leaves me a lot of freedom. I’m not locked in -
I could be a teacher one day, a food critic the next. I could open a yoga
studio or learn the art of sportscasting or sell insurance. It’s not only the
commitment that I’m afraid of, though. I’m afraid of wasting time. I’m afraid
of choosing poorly. I’m afraid, above all, that I won’t find work that is
meaningful, that is me, and that is making the world a better place.
I know I am asking a
lot. I’ve always been a perfectionist. But I have this feeling that I’m on the
cusp of something. I’m tired of taking the side roads and I want to forage
ahead into the unknown. I want to do the thing that is the hardest to do. The
trouble is, how do I do it when I don’t know what it is? In Po Bronson’s
What Should I Do With My Life?, he observes that of the hundreds of
people he interviewed, those who had succeeded in finding a calling often had
nothing more than an unquenchable hunger to go on: "The call was muffled
and vague at first. That blank urge is the call.” The trick is, you have
to let that blank urge take you somewhere. Anywhere. You have to take what a
friend of mine recently referred to as the Next Elegant Step.
All the self-help books
on this topic - and trust me, I’ve read a lot of them - say the same thing: you
need to stop reflecting and start acting. They argue, rather ironically, that
it’s time to put down the books, stop taking personality tests and making lists
and weighing pros and cons and imagining your ideal life - and time to jump out
there and try something. It’s like dating: you’re not going to meet the perfect
mate just by listing qualities you’re looking for on multi-colored sticky notes
and rearranging them endlessly while holed-up in your apartment. You’ve got to
take a leap of faith, swallow a heaping spoonful of vulnerability, and go meet
real people in the real touch-taste-see-hear-smell world. Why is that so
unbelievably scary?
I don’t know, but it is.
Today I was chatting
with an acquaintance after church and happened to let it slip that I'm unhappy
in my job, and ultimately, my field. She asked a question that I usually dread:
"If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?" This time,
I took a deep breath, put aside my embarrassment about lofty, unattainable
dreams, and stumbled through an outline of what I like to call my Evil Plan -
that glimmer of a maybe-sort-of-ill-formed-idea in the back of my mind. This
girl that I barely knew did not even flinch. She listened, asked clarifying
questions, and commented that the skills from my current job would really come
in handy in the development of this next one. She didn't provide some magical
lead, or offer me a million dollars in seed money, or help me understand my own
desires any better, but somehow the conversation was part of a rite of passage
for me.
Like the plot of a
yet-unwritten novel, I have been afraid to spoil the ending by leaking any hint
of my Evil Plan to anyone outside of my personal journal. But that has also
allowed me to get away with ignoring it - with watching the months float by in
silent paralysis. Now I am learning that speaking my dreams aloud - even when
they are foggy and silly-seeming - gives them flesh. By letting people in on my
secret, I allow them to do two things: I empower them to hold me accountable,
and I give them the opportunity to help me. Neither of these is comfortable.
They are, in many ways, the hardest thing.
And for me, that is
proof enough that I have begun to take my next elegant step.
