"We weren't changing the world when we were doing this thing," Stone recalls. "We were in an office that had rats in the basement, our team was fighting with each other, and everyone thought it was stupid."
-- on the starting of Twitter from "Two-Hit Wonder," by D. T. Max in the Oct. 21 2013 New Yorker
Some people know when they are twelve what they want to be when they grow up. My husband was one of those people. He knew at an early age he wanted to be a doctor, "a profession that demands excellence," as he told the medical school faculty when he was applying.
And he married me, someone with a vague notion that I wanted to do something important. What that was, I had no idea. I studied what I thought was interesting and followed my curiosity down a winding stream from math to history to communication.
I have just left a multi-year stint as a full-time volunteer where I learned more than I imagined. "Pony League Politics," is what a another fellow volunteer called our work. While I am happy to move on, I am now left with figuring out what the next step is. I am in that uncomfortable place with the rats in the basement, except without the prospect of hitting it big. It is just me and the rats and a new dog to keep me company.
I also wonder about what I want to "be" when I grow up. I've "been" for a awhile, perhaps I should reframe the question to "do." But doctors don't "do" medicine. They "are" doctors. When I was a child, I wanted to be a ballerina, a psychologist, a lawyer, and President of the United States. All of those things people "are." Clearly, the ship has sailed on three of those four career choices, and I have maybe a decade or two before I officially rule out President, even if it is a quantum leap from being on the sidelines in the local political scene to becoming leader of the free world.
Just as the world needs people who have an internal beacon guiding them along a career path starting in their early years, the world needs flexible people like me, who wander around looking for problems to solve, or letting their creativity or curiosity lead them down a circuitous path.
I wish I had a snappy, tidy little ending to this, but I don't. Tune in tomorrow.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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