When I was in college as a 21 year old senior at my undergraduate institution, I saw a need that could be filled with a little effort, and a little college funding and a lot of volunteers. I founded a college volunteer center where there was none. It wasn't that students didn't volunteer, they just could not find those opportunities on campus and had to find them at a neighboring college who was happy to take our students on. That year on campus of starting that organization felt like my skills in school and my passion for helping others and my drive and initiative were all coalesced in such a way to leave deep tracks that others could follow - and they did. The center exists on campus today and volunteerism is as natural as going to class - an expected way to contribute your skills and education.
Today as I try to make sense of where our skills, education and drive fit in life at later stages than the twenty something years, I wonder where drive and passion fit. I must have romanticized my journey - having read Goerte's "If you dream it, start it", inspirational ideas like "leap and the net will appear" and too many commencement speeches imparting a person to just follow what seems right and if it is right, it will bear fruit. I think of that now and wish I could relive that innocence. It goes along with, "If you are qualified, you will get the right job. If you are good at what you do, the money will follow. If you ask Santa for it, you will get it."
My next book is about family caregivers and it's also about bearing metaphorical fruit - despite laboring over situations involving our loved ones in their time of need. There isn't passion and drive when emergency and crisis situations arise calling forth effort and obligation and love. Yes this time of care bears fruit - it is creation that comes from an outpouring of many things - energy, emotion, care, tenderness, frustration, impatience, questioning, wondering "what if" and unless other things that come up. It's not like following breadcrumbs that lead to a successful new path in life whose steps seemed fatalistic.
While on my commute to work today I heard an interview with the creator of the film coming out soon, "Paterson" and the poet whose words inspire the bus driver protagonist. The movie has a mysterious draw in this improbable poet that no one expects to be writing poems on his bus route in which all of the dimensions implore his attention. The poetry is in the tradition of Williams Carlos Williams but the actual poet behind the screen play (Ron Padgett) said he used Williams as a starting point. As he read the screen play the character formed as he used his imagination and the words flowed from him differently. There were words he felt that were not his own - rather had come from inhabiting the imagined character in a deep and powerful way. Kind of like writers who seem to know their characters so well the stories write themselves. What I liked so much as well in this radio broadcast was that Padgett implores us to USE our imagination, so that we can inhabit other ways of being like poets do so well: "These people are like innovators and rebels. They deal with changing your consciousness. Their form is not a commercial one. Show me a poet that does it for the money, you know? I still think poets are like, for me, like rock stars. They're kind of magical people. They should just be given whatever they want." (source:http://www.npr.org/2016/12/27/507125816/paterson-a-love-poem-to-poetry-from-director-jim-jarmusch ). I was moved - profoundly moved by his words. Here he was saying, "don't stop imagining" at a time when my own heart says, Please stop imagining - it's not for the faint of heart who find things don't come to fruition so easily in reality.
Maybe the lesson for me is remembering to hear the poetry in my mind in the ride to work or the time at my new school. Like a bus driver, find the freeing in the routine. Because perhaps the call to action lies hidden. And it may be a call that merges the poet in me and the realist - where both get to play along - only if I imagine to my hearts content without the stop sign of my rational side putting the brakes on. Keep the dreaming alight just in casethe passion and drive and luck converge. If not I can let the imagined ideas of no use just flow and give them a deserving smile of "if only" - even when their stay is brief. Because in the end, aren't we all students of life? Regardless of where we are in this journey, we will experience the surprise, wonder, dismay, frustration and appreciation of so much we have let to learn about.
