I was driving down the expressway to town today at noon when the fact that I didn't have to show up for work, or do something scheduled in that sense, actually fully made sense to me. Rolling roads, idle traffic, sunlight through filtered shades, the wind rushing by, the bends and the curves, it was all there for me, throttling through my fingers.
I'm not typically the kind that worries about leaving a job, but I have to admit that even subconsciously I was a little sombre about the idea. It's a little funny that back when I was younger and I left my first job, I left with no worries at all, and bummed for as long as I did, and even went travelling a little before starting on the next job. I mean, that's the right idea, right? To live a little while you can, figure out what you're about. I think I did that. I read, played, exercised, thought about girls, you know, I tried writing, and that's been left aside for awhile, but I think I still have some unfinished business there, and which I might turn to in time. I figured out myself to a very good degree; to quote a great old boxer, I did the best I could with what I had. And of course having had to work for these past two years I left a little of what I was behind.
I'm a little caught up, I think, with the idea of what I'm expected to do. That's a little different from the idea of what I'm supposed to do. I think what I'm supposed to do comes as a reflection of what I'm actually fucking good at doing. But I have been thinking that what I might do before that is to work as a lawyer a little while longer. I mean, it's a real fucking career, isn't it? I don't know if I'm ready to say, well, I used to be a lawyer, and now, dot dot dot. And I'm actually not bad at being a lawyer. I'm actually not bad, and that gives me pause, it gives me a great deal of pause. But the days that I think to myself, I'm fucking dying here, outnumber the days that I leave thinking that all this still makes sense. I say to myself all the time, to varying degrees of gravity, that I'm fucking dying here. I'm fucking dying.
Of course I have the weight of my faith against all that sort of fretting. I do, it's true. I really do. From the things that I was taught, and which I believe, I accept the proposition that money (or reliance on it) is not really the kind of thing which makes us better when we worry about it. And throughout my adult life I've never had cause for concern about money. I find it very neat, and I think it's a little hard to fully understand or appreciate that without the lens of faith. Faith has been a very interesting, wonderful thing for me. It's somewhere in the back of my mind, and I think quite inspiring whenever it comes back into focus. Which is of course not to say that any other feelings of wonder and amazement, or religious-type feelings, if you will, couldn't be evoked by any other system of beliefs, or by the mere existence of beauty, surpassing beauty, in this world. It just so happens that Christianity is the one which I have adopted after all this time. Of course, I am asked to believe (and I do) that it is perhaps a rather special religion. But I think that when it comes to religion we have to look at the questions that are asked of it by first thinking about the objective of those questions. Some ask to test religion against the structures of the enlightened mind, conversely, some would like to figure out if there is such a thing as joy or peace in a divine sense, and of course many are curious in both senses. The former range may not have a definitive and intellectually satisfying end (if at least for those more philosophically cynical), and the latter reaches may bring a sense of cognitive dissonance in having to relinquish formal rationality (in the sense that a substantive leap of faith is actually required). But so much for this discussion.
The second idea that came to me when I was driving was that I have been given so many fine things that I have to make sure to use them, and also to be sure not to undermine their being used. It's something that I have been grappling with lately, the way that I often end up screwing things up by my annoyed reactions to situations which try my impatience too far. I'm actually a horrible guy. If it's a fair thing to wish, I wish that I had better role models growing up. I can read the old Chinese philosophers and their teachings on propriety and courtesy, but I need a life of learning to actually be like that. Anyway I realised that I was in this sense impairing the things that I could do, not for my own sake, but for those of others, and of the little children. And so I realised, deep in my heart, that I always had to take the high road, no matter what happened I always had to take the high road, because I had to be a person that little children, and that my friends and family, could admire and look up to. That I cared little for what people thought of me often meant that I had a very hard side to me, a horrible side. But I had to be Doctor J, or Jackie Robinson, in that sense, so that someone else might have something to believe in.
So that's the big secret. I'm actually really good with children. No, I'm the best. I'm the Doctor J of teachers. I'm not kidding, it's true. But I guess we'll see where that goes.
