when i grow up

Sometime earlier in the year, I came to the conclusion that I was ready to move on to adventures that don't involve teaching.  I thought I might like to try my hand at entrepreneurship, and in a way I still do, but I have inevitably, and possibly begrudgingly, returned to my old classroom digs.  And now, because of some rearrangements in the department, I am teaching a job skills class where the first order of business is to lead students to explore what they want to do with their lives.  Really?!

I guess I've asked for all of these lessons.

While I was looking for different articles for my students to read, I found this.  We're reading it together as a class because I secretly need to learn this stuff too.  Basically, it all boils down to the idea that when we do what we love, the time we spend doing it seems more like a gift than a chore.  We recieve the benefits, rather than earn them.  We go to bed at night, in awe,  thinking, "I can't believe I get to live this life!"

Here's the epiphany.  Isn't everything like this?   Friendship, romance, what we do, where we live?  If we recieve everything as a gift, how much would that change our lives?  I think significanly.  If we cherrish the things and people in our lives like rare gifts, we are less likely to take them for granted, rush them, or hoard them.  Maybe we wouldn't be so afraid of not having enough, of not being enough.

I guess this is where my quest for patience really comes full circle.  Please excuse my vagueness here, as I skirt delicately around the specifics.  I truly feel that I know what it is I want to be when I grow up, and I feel pretty confident that I know where I'm gonna be it.  I just don't know how to get there.  It takes patience to welcome and learn from obsticales, it takes trust and courage to abandon common logic in pursuit of a dream, and it takes humility to undertand that all the hard work in the world isn't going to get the job done without a little divine intervention.  And that, my friends, is a gift in itself.

It's funny the paths that God leads us down, some of them make sense to us and others, no matter how hard we try, never will.  We just have to be willing to trust that whichever road He leads us is going to get us where we need to be, when we need to be there.  I guess what I really want to be when I grow up is not a title but a state of mind.