My past two weekends off I have gone on two trips, one to New York City and one to Akron, Ohio. Each of these places presented a lifestyle that part of me yearns for, and that is very different from my Pittsburgh life.
Two weeks ago I stepped into the bustling world of The King's College - a small but potent school with 200 highly motivated and ambitious students. In the heart of New York City they buffet themselves with tough, mind-shaping classes, and enter the world of high-power businesses, media, and generally the movers and shakers of our lives. Even when you babysit, you're watching the kids of multi-millionaires. Connections are around every corner and sitting in every coffee shop, and the students are thrusting themselves into every opportunity they can get.
This past weekend I entered the artistic, expressive world of the Akron/Cleveland area. Walking into the Thompsons' basement you can tell the house is filled with creatures that must express themselves. Paintings litter the walls, the basement is bursting with instruments, and Cory and Ryan's rooms are bedecked with random artifacts, paintings and signs. Craig walks around in all sorts of abnormal outfits, and never seems to play the same band twice, or any band that I recognize. Everyone plays something, and anytime two or more are gathered together, music is there. In the circles I hang out in there, local bands are thown around in conversation like the Pens or Steelers are in Pittsburgh. There are billboards for the Akron film festival, and the radio waves are full of excellent music, instead of the 80's and country that clog the Pittsburgh airwaves. People are sophisticated musically and artistically, and the cities support them.
Part of me wants to throw myself into either one of these worlds. Try to realize the potential that I believe I should have as a sharp homeschool with a Summa in chemical engineering and a restlessly analytical mind. Why shouldn't I be writing music reviews for a New York magazine? Why shouldn't I be interning at a studio, living in a Brooklyn apartment, and meeting people in the city and building a network there? I'd even settle for going back to college and returning to the joy and pain of forcing my mind around new concepts and whipping it into shape with lectures and classwork. I would love to learn about history and economics and sociology, and see what I did in a setting like that.
Or I could let go of my partial hold on normalcy and dive into the world of music people. Find a part-time job to pay the bills, join some bands, play every gig I could get, practice electric guitar every day, record my songs, write new ones, be challenged by people better than me, and work myself in to venues and radio stations and studios.
Part of me wants to do either of those.
Part.
I'm 24. If I was destined for one of those lives, an unwelcome voice whispers that I'd already be in one of them. If my soul cried for expression so strongly, I would be driven to my guitar, driven to my studio, instead of stuttering at the whim of my inspiration and sinking into laziness as a default. If I was such a brilliant mind, I'd be tearing it up at Guardian and motoring for advancement, probably with my sights on a PhD or a specific career path. Instead I sit with a couple toes in each pond, and my body resting in the comfortable, predictable suburban life of my parents and grandparents.
Enter Solomon.
He and I hung out Friday as I read Ecclesiastes. I'll give you two paraphrases of what I took away from my reading:
1) "People work and work and strive, and they never enjoy what they get, and die, and no one remembers them. That's no good. The best that there is in this world is to enjoy what you do every day, and seek wisdom."
2) The farmers always win.
Why is it that in every movie, it's the farmers who are happy? How many times have stories contrasted the dashing life of some adventurer with the peace of an agricultural community? "Magnificent Seven" acknowledged it up front at the end - the surviving gunmen are riding out of town, and Yul Brynner comments that it's the farmers who really win in the end. Jet Li's character in "Fearless" learns peace and wisdom from the village he ends up in after destroying his life with Wushu fighting. I believe that the fiction in these stories reflects the innate truth that Solomon lays out in Ecclesiastes:
What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God. (Eccl. 2:22-24)
It would be folly to make myself unable to enjoy my current life by fretting for something different. And it may be ok to be ok where I'm at.
That is not a possibility I would have considered a week ago.
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3 comments:
Your last three posts were good.
Thanks man - I appreciate that.
Dude, very insightful. I'm excited to see you quoting Scripture and being changed by the God that breathed it out. Sometimes potential and longings need to age (perhaps like good Scotch?) until they reach the vigor and strength appropriate for the purpose for which God gave them.
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