The first image I can’t shake: A boy-man. He’s bright and thin and tall and wonderfully peculiar – that is, in the real sense of the word – special, distinctive, sui generis.
He’s a kick, eighteen, and can write like a dream. His hair is colored black or purple or magenta-brown, low over one eye.Long coat, tight pants.Wry smile. Sweet. Distinctive.
He doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.
The second image I can’t shake: What my 10 year old son said to me just nights ago, after pausing and testing the words in his head to see if they fit, after letting them settle on his tongue almosttasting them and then deciding that, yes, these are indeed the words. He said “Mama, I think I’m overwhelmed.”
I saw him listen to the sound of his sentence, and grow satisfied that he had used exactly the right words. “Shouldn’t I have a goal yet? Shouldn’t I know what I want to be? I might want to design toys, or build a time-travel machine, or cure cancer. But, I might want to be a bugler in the army. And what about global warming?”
The third image I can’t shake: the flyer I picked up in a local junior high. It said “What do you want to be when you grow up? The sky’s the limit if you start exploring now.”
Now, there are all sorts of good things about such a flyer. Exposing children, and their parents, to sources of funding and to mentoring programs are just two of them. But, this column is not about those things.
Nor is it about the kids who know, from a young age, exactly what they want to “be.”
It is about all the rest ofus.
This is for every freshman I ever taught at CSU who quit after the first semester because they were worried that they didn’t know what they wanted to be and thought they needed to figure it out first.
This is for every high school senior who thinks he or she is the only one who doesn’t have it all planned out.
This is for ten year olds who think they need a “goal”, right now, for fear of falling hopeless.
Education is not vocation. Edcuation is about enchantment.
It takes time to become enchanted. Sometimes it takes half a lifetime of small discoveries. Sometimes, it happens suddenly, like a small nudge of delight and you think “wow – I’m captured”. If you are lucky, enchantment happens over and over again. Always, it can’t be rushed. Always, it can’t be planned.
Enchatment happens when you make connections between seemilngly disconnected things. You may think you are aimlessly wandering from subject to subject – like a toddler trying to choose a cookie from a loaded tray, your hand hovers over each: Which one? Which one?But, in fact, you are firing neurons and laying trails and paths for the first, or the second, or the third of your enchantments. You are sifting for clues to the enchantments that will unfold all your life long.
And that is why you will be happy.
A job will come. And then others – probably many. Your work right now is learning. Just keep moving into the effort, keep sifting, keep pausing and gazing when you see something wondourous. Then move on. You are doing the hard work. It’s happening.
It’s like this: You hitch the beach seive your grandfather made out of 2’ by 4’s and screen-mesh over one shoulder and a shovel over the other. You walk down to the beach. It takes awhile. You note the feather ferns and the poppies. You go slowly.
When you finally get down the hill, past the pines and eucalyptus, out onto the open beach, you set your seive on two drift logs, and begin to shovel sand and small stones through the mesh.
What you may find in the sieve is a mystery. You will poke about in the pebbles, finger-shift the pieces, until you find a stone, or a shell that enchants you. And then you will be lucky. You will pocket the prize and keep digging.
The dig is important.Enchantment lies deep down. Walk, breathe, learn, read, play, dig. This is your hard work. The rest will come when you least expect it, and then again.
