I feel like the entire “post-graduate milieu” is something that has been so over-scrutinized, over-generalized, and over-simplified that when college grads finally get through the door and into “real life,” we a get huge, f’ing angry, snot-nosed Rhino instead of the fuzzy rabbit we were expecting.
I mean, sorry to be trite and corny, but I need humor and imagery to break down some of this stuff that’s encrusted up in my head.
I graduated less than ½ a year ago. Not even a full semester removed – with memories of my friends and housemates still so damned close to the surface that it hurts whenever I think of how I’ll never get that time back. Now I’m working. Full time. In front of a computer. I have a 401-K plan that I can kick off in another month, at which point I can effectively start saving for retirement …
I walk the same route to work each morning, ride the same train line to the same stop on the metro (McPherson Square!!), walk up the escalator and typically wait amidst the same dour faces on the roadside for that little white man to appear on the traffic signal across the way so that we can all trundle across L Street to our offices.
I’m 23 and in the midst of a routine so firm and shiftless it makes my spirit chafe beneath its solidity.
But that’s not really why I’m writing this. That’s just what’s causing the thought process.
I guess what I want to say is that I know in my gut that I don’t “have” to be doing this. That I’m very, very much lucky to have the means to pay rent, to buy food at the local Safeway and to be surrounded by my creature comforts: my computer, tv, my books and what-have-you.
My parents are proud of the fact that I have the job. I know that. Trust me, I do. Other friends are doing other things: some are saving the world and doing things I truly wish I was doing right now. Some are teaching, some are working part-time jobs, some aren’t working at all. I’m proud of them all.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, all of that “doing something” and “making a life” is for whatever reason the perfect thing to put that damned Rhino right to sleep. And at least for me, that’s the last thing I want. I think the life you end up making with that kind of work often falls short of what your heart might be yearning for.
I don’t ever want work and paycheck to undercut feeling and emotion and intrigue. I don’t ever want boredom and monotony to dull my sense of wonder. I voiced that concern to my Mom this weekend … and she told me that it never would. That it couldn’t with me. I sure as hell hope so.
Because there’s a whole generation of us (people my age), and there have been many before us, with the “work” part emphasized, but not the Great Battle with the charging Rhino. And if we’re not careful, we’re all going to learn to subdue the danger and magic inherent in that fight with cheap routines and thoughtless actions which keep the charging passion inside of us at bay … but can never fully eradicate our soul’s need for its sustenance.
I’m NOT for one second trying to say that we should all abandon work. I also don’t think we’re all capable of doing things like the Peace Corps, or of moving halfway across the world to help a war-torn Africa. Some of us aren’t made for that type of jarring change. For those of us who are, I think it’s a wonderful thing. But we’re all cut differently, we’re all suited for making different change. But I think it’s the act of effecting that change that is truly important.
I really do think that we can all work in such a way that we lets us contribute to a world that is better for the war-torn villages in Africa as well as for the impoverished right here in this country. They don’t call it a “shared humanity” for nothing.
I wrote part of this and walked away to make a few phone calls – and to sort of let things process … and I had a thought: what would Kahlil Gibran say about work? What would he say about a ‘calling’? I’ve found his words so comforting in the past … I guess I couldn’t help but check.
Here’s what he says:
“And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself,
and to another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
… It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
Often have I heard you say,
as if speaking in sleep, ‘He who works in marble, and finds the
shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler
than he who plows the soil.
And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man,
is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.’
But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide,
that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks
than to the least of the blades of grass;
[ I love this next line …]
And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.”
Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet. Pp. 27-30.
And there’s not much I can say to add to that. Gibran gives me insight into the reason why some of my most vibrant memories and happiest times were with people I met waiting tables at the nursing home I worked at in Lititz; mowing lawns with a middle-aged Mexican immigrant named Miguel who always, always seemed cheerful; pouring concrete with a bunch of guys whose skin would be like leather in two decades while they were still out under the same hot sun doing the same old thing.
It also gives me insight into some of the fallacies of reasoning that get us all in trouble: we start thinking of one type of work as “better” than another, and disparage things in our own minds before we even begin to realize the utility it might hold. We work boring and mind-numbing jobs and forget that the passion inside of us can be nourished and can grow in the time we’re there.
When I really sit down and admit it to myself, I'm learning a lot at this job ... about myself, about the world, and about other people, their professions and the lives they make.
Yet soon I will undoubtedly need to take on that damned old Rhino charging. The thing has shaken me lately, that’s for sure. But in the end it’s a battle for relevance and change – for wrestling the spirit from all of the societal fetters that have made it seem like heart is bad.
“And all work is empty save when there is love ...”
I’m sorry to put that all out there so abruptly … but I guess I just feel like maybe I’m not the only one who feels like I stepped into a battle I wasn’t quite prepared for, and that I’m winging it now, hoping to beat a path toward something that I can do with the love inside of me.
