Yay! I'm on my way...
Happily, my world seems to be settling down a bit. Not with any less activity, but somehow a bit more organized. I'm finally finding time to return to the book I'm working on. My habit has been to postpone it until other things are out of the way - which is probably a mistake to begin with, as things are never out of the way. But I'm getting better at the preliminaries: getting up earlier, limiting my meditation time, avoiding the computer before noon . . . that sort of thing.
What I'm working on is the story of my life. Volume 2, which covers my working years. That's not the intended scope of it, but that's what it's really all about. The intended scope is the Summer years of my life. My first volume was all about the Spring years. You can see the pattern I'm laying out. My 'Summer' was the second 21 years of my life. Actually, I worked a couple years beyond that, but for practical purposes I was done with it by then. I'm talking about wage-paying work, paycheck stuff. I didn't stop working then, but I stopped whoring myself for a regular paycheck. And it was not done out of principle (to begin with), but because my life had gotten so tangled up by then, that I had to bust out of the mess.
That's what I think makes my life an interesting tale. The second half of it has been as different from the first as day from night. From my personal perspective, in fact, I wish I had known better than to waste an entire season of it going in the wrong direction. I know, I know . . . I had to go the wrong direction in order to find the right direction. I suppose that's true, but I've never been convinced that it had to be so, or should have been. In my view, the schooling that taught me all the practical capabilities I possess (and for which I am thankful), should also have taught me some of the things I only learned by going through the hard knocks.
There's a letter in this month's Harpers in which the writer, a young mother from Mystic, Conn., says "Compulsive schooling, the brainchild of industrial magnates in the late 1800s, had the repugnant goal of creating a docile, easily exploited workforce. Schooling was, and is, intended to create parameters within which we are allowed to think."
Just think about that for a moment. We were trained to think within certain boundaries. And if you didn't naturally fit within those boundaries, it was just too bad. You went along with it anyway, because there was no one who ever told you there were other reasonable (or at least possible) ways of conceiving things. A vise-like grip on your mind, that you didn't even know existed.
My heresy is that I could not easily or usefully conform to the values and principles of the commercial world. So it took me some 21 years of rather pointless wandering, through every job field I had the continuing faith and stomach to invest myself in, before I finally realized that there was nothing there for me.
That's it, you see: I threw away some 21 years of my life, before I found the courage, or just the plain sense, to break out of those limiting parameters that the society and its schooling system had imposed on me. So part of my purpose, in writing about this journey of a 'seasoned life' is to help folks who are similarly stuck in the same dead-end alley, butting their heads against the same hard walls as I did, and not knowing WHY it never seems to bring them what they want.
What I'm working on is the story of my life. Volume 2, which covers my working years. That's not the intended scope of it, but that's what it's really all about. The intended scope is the Summer years of my life. My first volume was all about the Spring years. You can see the pattern I'm laying out. My 'Summer' was the second 21 years of my life. Actually, I worked a couple years beyond that, but for practical purposes I was done with it by then. I'm talking about wage-paying work, paycheck stuff. I didn't stop working then, but I stopped whoring myself for a regular paycheck. And it was not done out of principle (to begin with), but because my life had gotten so tangled up by then, that I had to bust out of the mess.
That's what I think makes my life an interesting tale. The second half of it has been as different from the first as day from night. From my personal perspective, in fact, I wish I had known better than to waste an entire season of it going in the wrong direction. I know, I know . . . I had to go the wrong direction in order to find the right direction. I suppose that's true, but I've never been convinced that it had to be so, or should have been. In my view, the schooling that taught me all the practical capabilities I possess (and for which I am thankful), should also have taught me some of the things I only learned by going through the hard knocks.
There's a letter in this month's Harpers in which the writer, a young mother from Mystic, Conn., says "Compulsive schooling, the brainchild of industrial magnates in the late 1800s, had the repugnant goal of creating a docile, easily exploited workforce. Schooling was, and is, intended to create parameters within which we are allowed to think."
Just think about that for a moment. We were trained to think within certain boundaries. And if you didn't naturally fit within those boundaries, it was just too bad. You went along with it anyway, because there was no one who ever told you there were other reasonable (or at least possible) ways of conceiving things. A vise-like grip on your mind, that you didn't even know existed.
My heresy is that I could not easily or usefully conform to the values and principles of the commercial world. So it took me some 21 years of rather pointless wandering, through every job field I had the continuing faith and stomach to invest myself in, before I finally realized that there was nothing there for me.
That's it, you see: I threw away some 21 years of my life, before I found the courage, or just the plain sense, to break out of those limiting parameters that the society and its schooling system had imposed on me. So part of my purpose, in writing about this journey of a 'seasoned life' is to help folks who are similarly stuck in the same dead-end alley, butting their heads against the same hard walls as I did, and not knowing WHY it never seems to bring them what they want.