Tell me about yourself.

[resonant]

I'm suddenly struck with the desire to know how other people do the things that matter most to them, how they find and follow their passions.

How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?

Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?

Comments

[j-bluestocking.livejournal.com]

Years ago, in the days of my youth, I was working in a word processing center, alongside a lot of other people who weren't making a lot of money. A middle-aged, outspoken, blue-collar African-American woman sat behind me; we didn't have a lot in common, but we'd talk to pass the time and amuse ourselves. One day she asked, "What would you be, if you couldn't be a writer?"

And this is something that's happened to me a few times in life -- that is, someone asks a question, and you do a kind of lightning-fast, nonverbal overview, and come up with an answer you may not have known you had. In this case, a great many things flew through my mind: how I'd enjoyed anthropology in college, the possibilities in experimental psychology as a career, history -- and I said, "Nothing."

"Oh," she said darkly. "You're one of those."

So I guess I'm what katallison, above, calls a hedgehog. This often makes me un-useful when less hedgehoggy people talk to me about vocation. Having said this, I believe that, monomaniacal though I am, if I could live long enough, I'd happily explore all sort of paths. Because they are in fact there. I believe most people have far more potential in them for moving in different directions than they give themselves credit for.

I don't think someone can seek out a passion in the sense of an obsession; obsessions seek you out. But people can, well, choose their own adventures. Richard Feynman liked to learn new skills simply because he enjoyed learning new skills -- painting, playing musical instruments; and he and a friend once chose a small eastern European town at random, learned all they could about it, made it their hobby, and one day, years later, managed a trip behind the then-collapsed Iron Curtain to visit the place. There is joy in such things, and hedgehog though I am, I regret I can't live a sufficient number of centuries to experiment with the roads not taken.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

"Oh," she said darkly. "You're one of those."

I love this!

Writing, though, is an inherently foxish calling, I think -- you're always telling stories, but the stories are always different.