On the wall of my dorm room freshman year were many scraps of paper, more or less artistically cut, bearing some phrase or slogan, or occasionally a stanza from a poem. I still have them all in a folder; "Hamlet Schmamlet" is my favorite, for assorted subtle "you had to be there" kinds of reasons. But one of them, written much smaller, reads: "Another day at Oglethorpe: slack off, drink coffee, and develop a new plan for our lives." One of us said it at Starbucks one evening, I think just after we had been detailing plans for the coffee shop/ice cream bar we were going to establish some day (the ice cream was at my insistence.) Or perhaps that was the week we decided we would all get PhDs-- Joy in philosophy, me and Rachel in English I think-- and come back and teach together at Oglethorpe. We loved to sit around and design futures for ourselves, new ones coming as regularly as paper assignments (there might have been a correlation, actually.) This never seemed to get old.
That was six years ago. Apparently it still hasn't gotten old. I've spent the last several months coming up with new plans. It's all hovering around the academic lately, and the list of graduate degrees I've "decided" to get since January is prodigious. On Monday I came up with a definitive plan, one that encompassed all my hopes and ideals for a satisfying life, and contained several contingency plans and branching possibilities. A settled, workable plan, so I could stop trying to figure out what to do with my life and start actually doing it. A map of my future, drawn in ink. I've already started revising it.
Meh, it's a fun game. And judging by my parents, it's a game that I won't stop playing any time in the next several decades. Anyway all those things that I want to do with my life are secondary. I know what I want to be when I grow up: I want to be honest. I want to be someone who can speak the truth without having to concentrate. I want to be transparent. I want to be so secure in who I am that it's okay for people to actually see me, and even dislike me if they want to.
I want to be willing to learn, to change, to be wrong. I want to get rid of the idea that I have to be unapproachably excellent at everything I do. I want to learn NOT to laugh at my mistakes; laughter is a defense, a hastening to poke fun at myself before anyone else does. I want to champion my mistakes, to stand by them, to proclaim, "Yes! I screwed up. But didn't I screw up grandly?" I want to get through a game of go without undergoing a personal crisis.
I want to occupy my own place in the universe. I want to be generous with the gifts I have, instead of worrying that they're not welcome or not sufficient or not the right kind. I want to accept that I can't be everything to everyone, and to love the people I'm given to love in the way I'm capable of loving. I want to reach out to people freely, when I have the impulse, even when I don't know how they'll respond.
In short, I want to be free from self-absorption and cringing pride, to inhabit my own skin with peace, to stand in the world with all the grace and self-possession of the tree that is flowering outside my window.
Anyway, it's a start.
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2 comments:
Keep me in on how this all goes -- the becoming of these things. I've been thinking a lot about -- well, let's just put it this way .. the development of the self. The narrative of my self, I might even be so bold as to say. Who I want to be. Who I am. Why I am this way. Where I am growing (or shrinking) and what steps to take to become who I want to be (though I know there will always be one step further). Did I talk about this in my email to you last week? I think it might have come up.
For me, a lot of this has come from looking at some years in which I see regrets and wish I could have done things different. I used to say that I wouldn't ever regret anything, and everything could be used for growth. Sure, it can be used for growth, but it doesn't mean it couldn't have been better (but who knows really...) if my choices had been different. So I'm looking back and thinking of how I can do it differently this time around. Like you, I am not laughing at my mistakes; unlike you, I am not standing proudly by them ... because they hurt too much, too deeply.
As usual, interesting post, Ginny.
Yeah, that business of standing by mistakes needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. The attitude I'm really trying to cultivate is probably best expressed in these words: "So be it. Now what?" In other words, not to trivialize or disown what I've done by laughing at it; but neither to hide it or hide from it, or pretend it wasn't a mistake by continuing on in the same course, or try to argue it out of its mistakenness. Just to let it stand as what it is, a mistake, but a mistake which is now part of your life, like everything else you do. And then figure out what to do next.
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