Monday, February 21, 2011

Life

Today I sit at my desk totally at a loss as to what to do with my life. Post-graduation the only concrete option seems to be to go back to school, but that's not happening so soon after regaining intellectual freedom. To be able to read any book I want is just to delicious to give up. I can savor authors for hours upon hours now, reread passages until they echo between my ears and never give a though to writing a, dare I say the word... paper. It must be good to take a break from producing work to let ideas saturate the mind. I just want to devour book after book. If only I could get paid to read.

I'm reminded of this passage from one of my favs:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7

I can see so many lives I want to live, so many adventures to have. How do we ever decide what to become? Nietzsche is said to have liked the motto "Become what you are." I take this to mean that you should follow your intuition. My intuitions take me in twenty different directions every day. Become what you are. Become a cupcake maker, become a ukulele player, become a philosophy professor. Become what you are...

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