List O' Week

Last night I had a long conversation with myself. I've gone through (ahem, caused) a massive amount of change in my life in the past few months. Change is good. One of the better things about change is that it forces you to reevaluate your life, your plans, your goals. What do you want? What do you need? What are you willing to work for?

The conversation I had with myself was something of a non-surprising eye-opener, as all good personal conversations should be. Everything that I learned about myself last night I already knew. What I hadn't done until last night was prioritize; I hadn't given myself permission to accept my real goals in favor of what I felt I wanted. And here's my list:

1) The key to productivity is understanding yourself: Balance is everything.

Twice in my academic career I've created for myself what amounts to an existential nightmare. Both times were during terms in which I've taken nothing but philosophy classes. This is not because I don't love philosophy, but because I need to get my hands dirty on a daily basis to be a happy, functioning human being. Philosophy classes alone entail ten weeks of nothing but reading, and reading is not work. Reading is leisure. Math and science, and the daily homework that accompanies them, are mandatory. Everyone has their own particular balance, and this is mine.

Not coincidentally, the single term that I took nothing but science and math I ended up reading more philosophical works than any other period of my life. They were a good mental workout in comparison to the work I was doing in school, but even better, I was able to focus only on the philosophers that I loved and whose work I was interested in reading.

2) The key to productivity is understanding yourself: Play is not Play if there's no Work.

I was able to do nothing for four days and 17 hours. Then I got a job.

I am not happy when I have nothing to do. I am happy when I have pressing things to do that I can put off for a short period of time: what I call the procrastination/productivity continuum. When I am able to procrastinate, I can accomplish all sorts of things that, minus the pressure, I would never, ever do. I write. I make time to play. I thought that I would spend this summer writing and reading and doing whatever pleases me, but no. This is not how I spent my four days and 17 hours. Without deadlines, I learned the meaning of the four-hour nap. Then I watched two seasons of Grey's Anatomy. Afterwards, I took another four-hour nap, and woke up with a cobwebby nap-hangover. Then I had a long, long conversation with myself.

Then I got a job.

3) Settling is for people who settle.

Last night I was genuinely concerned that I would be unable to find work. Someone I met recently suggested working in grocery; they were hiring, after all. This did not please me.

When unemployment looks you straight in the face, it's easy to settle. Surely settling is better than going hungry, eh? Well, maybe... maybe not. Last night, in the middle of my long conversation with myself, I decided that I would take no action that was irrelevant to my goals.

Grocery is not relevant (to me. I know a lot of lovely people in grocery).

Interestingly, I had been trucking up to school every day for the last two weeks, trying to hunt down the head of the Environmental Sciences department, who had offered me a job about six months ago. While I was still ambivalent about whether I really wanted a job or not, I had had no luck. This morning, after my long, long conversation with myself, I found her. Then I got a job.

4) Happiness is more than a decision.

There's a lot to the idea that you can decide to be happy, that you can make the leap from glass-is-half-empty to glass-is-half-full. I think the mistake lies in that people think they can be truly happy doing work they hate or don't believe in, just by making this decision.

If anything, making this decision should allow you the courage to face your situation head-on. Choosing happiness isn't forcing happiness; it's caring enough about yourself to be honest about what you want and accepting the fact that what you want is (unfortunately) attainable.

Which means that it's your fault if you don't get it.

5) Sacrifice doesn't bother you when it's for something you love.

My mother always told me that if it hadn't have been for her mom, she would have been an astronaut. For years I translated this in my head as, "If only I wouldn't have listened to my mother, I would have been an astronaut."

I just realized she meant this literally.

I love my mother. I really do. She and I are both equally strange, somewhat aggressive people. We behave in many similar ways. She likes to think of herself as a fighter, someone tough, who doesn't take no for an answer and will achieve whatever she damn well feels like achieving. You don't stand in my mother's way.

Unless, of course, you're her mother.

I suppose parenthood makes fools of us all. My mother, who laments frequently over her broken dreams, still finds herself telling me not to go to graduate school, to stay home and raise babies and support my husband, and that I shouldn't leave my marriage just because we're completely incompatible and unhappy.

I've ignored such pleas my entire life. In high school, when she found out I was dropping choir to take journalism instead, we had to have a long and painful discussion about commitment and sticking to things and how-am-I-ever-going-to-get-into-college. A year later, when I dropped journalism for photography, we pretty much had the exact same discussion. These were relatively minor decisions, sure, but you wouldn't have been able to tell from the depth and agony of these conversations.

In other words, I learned a long time ago that the path to personal fulfillment is not through listening to your mother.

I'm still sad that she did, though.

Like it or not, we're role models for our children. I could stay with my husband; I could even stay home and pursue a career of four-hour naps. But I can't: it simply isn't physically possible to live a life you're incapable of living. Secondly, even if I could, I wouldn't. I have a moral responsibility to pursue my own happiness, so Lyra can see that this is a good way to live.

Most importantly, though, I can't place the blame for my unhappiness on Lyra's shoulders. I can't point to her and say, "If only it weren't for you." My decisions are not her fault.

6) Everything comes around and back again. You just can't tell when you're making the right decision for the wrong reasons.

A few months ago, I agreed to enter into a different graduate program than the one I had been planning because someone (cough, cough) didn't want to move.

Then I said to hell with it, I'm going to move anyway.

The liberation that comes with such a decision is breath-taking. Wondrous, even. And so I was happy, happy that I would be doing something that I love.

Then I had a long, long conversation with myself. And I decided to take the other graduate program anyway, not because someone wants to stay in Portland, but because it's right for me: the right balance, the right fit, the right pursuits and the right pleasures. I just couldn't see it because I wasn't looking at it in the right way.

Life is funny like that.

The end.