Completely unrequested life blah (rated E for terribly earnest)

While you are all most likely heading back to gainful employment after new year revelry, I have just left it and am in that 'hmmm, work, yes, should do some of that soon' space right now. As for the job interview shennanigans, my most recent one went well (the follow up to that December thing) and involved many cups of tea and chatting - 'getting to know you time' (hmm, new corporate casual) before then retiring to the boardroom to wow them with wonderful things with bits of paper on whiteboards. Those of you who do this kind of thing know what I'm talking about, those that don't just be glad that you will never face a workshop session armed with scraps of paper and fabulous engaging processes (said 'PROHHHHHH-cesses' with frown and much head nodding) to plan things, and well workshop things and generally lure ideas out of their hidey holes and birth them into the bright fluoro light for us to goo and gaa over.

Yeah, so thought it went swimmingly well, but that said have not heard back yet which either means I didn't get it, or that it is just taking a while (1 week thus far).

Anyway, quite apart from that I am having a much bigger life rethink, and whilst it is one of the biggest things happening for me and has been for the last year and a bit, I suspect that I don't always talk about it heaps, or clearly. Thought I would at least try to address the former if not the latter with a bit of spill-your-guts-out blogging. Mostly for those dear friends of you who read this and may have been thinking 'what the hell is this girl doing with her life???' but are too polite to ask.

So - here goes for earnest and actually not at all glib or hip or political or even trying to be funny blogging. Drumroll. Bearing in mind that this is just one version, a quick slice through something which is intrinsically changeable and multifaceted - this is like the quick readers digest version. Bearing in mind also that I love all my friends dearly and this is not a dig at you or me or the many ways we all choose to live - it is just a very personal response to the time and place in general that I find myself in.


The story goes like this:

This last year has been great not working full time, such a welcome change. Nice also to be living by myself these last 6 months for the first time in like, well lets face it - forever. The part-time thing has been a deliberate attempt to get some balance into my life and live out some of my values. I don't like working late and then being tired and having not time to eat well or exercise or play or be creative or read or think. I don't like work getting most of my head space. So nice instead to have a more cruisy lifestyle and do lots of creative things to counterbalance work, which tends to be quite 'head' focused.

I am in a phase of opening up more space for things I enjoy doing, rather than just being so focused on doing what I think 'should be done'. Some kind of out of control utilitarian philosophy or lingering protestant work ethic seems to have guided me up until now... So now I am trying to do self-indulgance as well as trying to save the world, in the understanding that what is good for me is also good for those around me - if I nurture myself and am happy, I have more to give - if I have more to give, I am happier. Or "you have to be happy to be useful" as it was articulated in a dream I had.

Actually I have been thinking a lot about what the hell my role is - how I can do the most good in my short days on the planet (yes yes saturn return, almost 30, predictable rethink of approach to life). Of course underlying all of this is a pondering about how to live well in a world that is both fucked up and exquisitely perfect. I still feel like poverty, inequity, enviromental degradation, loss of habitat, loss of species... and many more things that I care about are huge issues, and I feel like they are my issues that I have to contribute to tackling somehow. I have these amazing dreams about animals some nights and I wake up and feel called to do something. Not intellectually, but much deeper than that - in my gut, in my heart, in the places you can't rationalise away. Sometimes I read an article about the fate of gorillas, or toxins in polar bears, or turtles and I cry - I literally cry. It's like reading it makes me hurt with loss because I can't quite reconcile how it is that the people around me and I go about our business day after day acting like the minutae of city life is important when we could lose tigers. We could lose tigers because we came from one of the richest countries in the world, got educations that surpass those of millions and millions of people and proceeded to become the complacent global elite. Like the new nobility, except our serfs are so far away we pretend that we are 'just making it' and that really we're hard up compared to the really well-off(the Packers/ those dole bludgers/ those couples without kids/ those couples with kids/ those migrants / those whoevers).

We proceeded to pretend that we didn't know that the way we live and the things we avoid dealing with are having huge impacts, we act like everything is being dealt with by someone else and we are free to just have pleasant lives with nice clothes and good haircuts and nice whitegoods, and we spend hours and fortunes making our lives pretty enough, accessorised enough and hoping that we fit in nicely and will never stand out or be lonely or feel foolish. We pretend that this now and here is 'normal' - that it is the global and historical norm (while it clearly is not), or that here is the destination of civilisation, that now is modern and developed and hi-tech and clever (and hence above criticism, and hence by definition 'good', and hence not to be questioned). I feel like so much goes unquestioned and so many people in our society live in a torpor of habit and comfort. And I say that with love ! Well, actually with understanding but also with sadness at a lost opportunity.

So with that as a backdrop, and aside, a wider frame, I guess I am trying to find what it is that I can do which is useful and also energises me. I do know that working in laminex world with plodders does not energise me, and although useful and related to the *issues* I care about, is a form of clock-ticking sensory deprivation which makes me feel like a battery hen - confined and lifeless. I know that drawing and writing energises me but I suspect that filling blank books and putting them in the cupboard is not useful to the world at large. I like people too and amazed at the complex and subtle cross-fertilisation of ideas and mutual support that happens across relationships, but I hate being surrounded by people 24/7 and I get edgy if I am forced to be around busy, noisy people without time out for quiet contemplation.

So: back to the day job issue - I can't figure out what I should be doing. (And I don't usually use the word should, but do so here because it feels right, because I do know what I *could* be doing - I could wallpaper rooms with lists of coulds).

My ideal life is like one quarter hands on field ecologist and environmental activist, camping, watching the stars, living quietly, having chickens, shopping at the coop, doing community projects/ one quarter UN Environment -Development policy director doing research and writing big bossy reports and guiding action wearing fuckoff suits and swapping between all the appropriate European languages/ one quarter very messy bohemian artiste in overalls, never brushing my hair and drinking red wine and dancing and singing the blues / and one quarter ascetic bookish hermit writing tomes of ponderous theory and austere poetry. Of course rather than pursuing these vocations in succession over decades, I seem to want to pursue them all concurrently, which is why I feel at such an impasse currently??

Anyway, I realise you didn't say 'so, J, tell me about your life crisis' so I wont go on anymore. But you get the gist.

Did I get the job?
Do I want the job?
What job could I possibly do that feels like it authentically contributes to the things I care about whilst also nourishing my spirit?
What on earth am I supposed to be doing?

Or as Jeanette Winterson so beautifully put it in Art and Lies:

"How shall I live? The question presses on me through the thin pane. The question tails me through the dense streets. In the anonymous computer-face of the morning mail, it is the only question that I read in red-ink, the question burning the complacent page...... ..The question daubed on dooor-posts. The question drawn in the dust. The question hidden in the bowl of lilacs. The insolent question at a sleeping god. The question that riddles in the morning, that insinuates at noon. The question that drives my dreams to wakefulness, the question physical in beads of sweat. 'Answer me' whispers the voice in the desert. The silent place where the city has not yet come."