A Patchwork Life

Get Leave to Work

18 Jun 2009 6 Comments

by Jackie in all about me, conversations, poetry, writing

Today a friend of mine and I spent the afternoon talking about work, careers, families, spouses, money and why we make the choices we make, something I had been thinking a lot about for my own reasons (more specifically, stuff I’m not ready to blog about yet) but also for more philosophical reasons (which I think I am ready to blog about).

I listened to a podcast yesterday on leaving academia, in which a friend of mine was interviewed about her choice to leave a tenured position and in fact leave behind academia forever (you know who you are). The interview subject finds herself still leading a life about education, writing, and editing, but not nearly in the way she imagined, or in the more predictable path she had been following. I found myself nodding along, but also reminded of what I’ve come to believe more and more strongly as the years roll on: once we discover what is important to us and move those things into the center of our lives, fulfillment often follows, though it comes under names and guises we might not have recognized before. Sometimes I’m reminded of it in major ways, like career choices, and sometimes I’m reminded of it when the stereo breaks in my car and I spend my driving time singing all the songs I know, because music is that necessary to me. But the older I get, the more I see what is important to me, what I’m willing to fight for, what I’m not willing to live without.

I went to a poetry lecture Monday night given by Sue Ellen Thompson, a poet I was unfamiliar with before, and her words really resonated with me. She talked about poetry as autobiography, lyric poetry and emotional truth, and a lot of other subjects, but what struck me most was how she spoke about her work as a pursuit she follows because of what it gives back to her: “poetry as a survival mechanism for adversity, but also as consolation for adversity itself,” and how to make her poems useful both for her and her readers. I don’t know how to survive in the world without writing my way through it, but I also want it to be consolatory for anyone reading it, because language has always given me my greatest consolation. And this is my work, just as much as teaching is, because it fulfills me and is essential to who I am and who I want to be, even though it doesn’t fit into a lucrative or well-defined box.

I guess this is where I fall in line with the Etsy entrepreneurs and shop class or even parenting as soulcraft folks, and all those who yearn to be of use. Do the dirty work, the hands-on work, the crafty or girly work, the work that greases up your hands or mucks up your clothes with baby vomit: just do the work that engages and envelopes you, that absorbs each of your capacities, the work you can’t imagine going without, and the rest will fall into place.