Quarter Life Catharsis
It occured to me one over cast Monday morning as I sat at my desk in Georgetown, that I was created. I'd had a chat with a good friend over the previous weekend, and it was he who brought up this unwittingly prolific statement. Since then, I hadn’t been able to really get it out of my mind. Created…what does that mean anyhow?
Well there’s always dear old Merriam-Webster which states the obvious, “To cause to exist; bring into being,” but that’s not very inspirational. Sure the old B-I-B-L-E says that in God’s image we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” but again, I ask you…what does it mean? Okay, I promise I’m not about to launch into some creepy diatribe about the meaning of life, Aristotle’s theory on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God or anything so mundane. For mercy’s sake it IS only Monday.
I will say, however, that another definition of the word created did strike a cord with me in a way I never would have seen until today. The same dictionary, in its 4th definition defines the word created as a verb meaning, “To produce through artistic or imaginative effort.” The key words that stood out in my mind are artistic and effort. Somewhere, somehow, regardless of your personal convictions or belief system, each of our lives has been created. The evidence is, well, self-evident. There you are. But the notion that this has happened with effort, that we were artistically produced, tells me that it’s on purpose. Life is no accident.
Now, personally, I’ve had a bit of a go of things lately. Since my last entry I’m no longer locked in the dungeon of corporate America. I was “down-sized” for “budgetary purposes.” I thought I was bitter…but now that I’m gainfully employed elsewhere, my perspective on a lot of things have changed. In some ways that’s natural. But in other ways, it’s taken a conscious effort to see past my own foregone conclusions about the process of life to see the reality of life for its own good sake.
What I mean is…I’ve looked at this created life of mine; what it has been up to now, where I am this minute and what I hope it will be in the future. All the usual rigmarole comes to light. Health, wealth and prosperity, but that’s only natural. Everyone is a relative subscriber to Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. What I’m finding is, even though mathematically, the quickest way from point A to point B is a straight line; life is not geometry.
It’s a convoluted process this coming into one’s own. I laugh at the many versions of myself that I thought I had figured out. As a high school senior I wanted to be a physical therapist. As a college freshman I was enthralled with languages and astronomy. And I’ll never quite forget the day I tripped over a knapsack in Saint Thomas Hall and smacked right into the poster on the wall of the graduate school I would attend the very next academic year.
Life, as I’m learning, is a process of reinventing yourself. Not for the sheer need to bend to the will of those who keep you in their employ. No…it’s more a factor of continual self-discovery.
Sitting now, in my office at a marketing firm in Georgetown Harbour, I’m munching calmly on sushi and potato chips. I have no pressing engagements for the afternoon and I aspire to get to the gym this evening as I am on one of my health kicks again.
Finding contentment where one is at is a virtue, I believe. For a young woman such as myself who, since age 13, and probably before, has been pushed and nudged and challenged to succeed and excel and blow the doors off the world at large, it’s come as quite a shock that, right now, my Creator requires of me nothing more than to be silent, simple and still. And where silence and stillness are not so much the challenge, simple, in a world of drama queens and Jerry Springer scenarios, is less attainable.
You see I fall within a range of young people just at the bitter end of generation-X and not quite within the same frame of mind as the generation-next. We are the founders of the quarter-life crisis, the survivors of the dot COM revolution and the victims of the corporate chasm and hiring freeze generated by the War on Terror.
We have Master’s degrees, some of us, Doctoral degrees. We work 50 hours a week for forty thousand dollars a year and we all have an average of fifty thousand dollars in college loan debt. Myself, I boast a bit above the average…but who’s counting?
We are commitment-phobic. Marriage is no longer a social norm, monogamy is easily scoffed at and singleness…for my fellow ladies out there, is viewed more often than not as a season in purgatory, to quote Josh Harris, rather than a time during which we can simply enjoy getting to know ourselves.
Yes it’s an interesting age. But I think, perhaps, I’ve decided I don’t wish to subscribe to this norm any longer. I don’t want to work 50 hours a week for people who hate each other and say loathsome things about you, me and everybody under the guise of raising money or lobbying the Appropriations Committee to make up the short-fall of Fiscal Year funding.
No. No I think perhaps, in a world, which all my life has demanded excellence of me in terms of productivity, I turn now to myself and decide to produce a more mentally and spiritually healthy and prepared human being. Not as a means of steeling up against a destabilized job market but, rather, to contend with the face in the mirror.
It’s a good thing to have knowledge, but wisdom and knowledge, I’m learning, simply aren’t the same. Gaining wisdom has shifted my priorities to aspire to a lifestyle and work ethic that has less to do with gathering an abundance of ‘stuff.’ Rather, I believe this is a time in my life to make good memories again. Like a born-again childhood, I can look at age twenty-something and even perhaps 30 something and know I don’t need to have all the answers today. To find these answers I’ll need to embrace many adventures and mysteries in days to come. Wide-eyed trepidation and nervous anticipation for what lies ahead on the road of life should not be gone by one’s mid twenties.
You see I realized that I have the entirety of my life to toil away on analysis of legislative strategy initiatives and policy briefs, homework and lesson planning. I do not, however, have the rest of my time to enjoy being a young woman, falling in love as an adult for the first time, traveling, having a home of my own and trying one last time to know the family I love with all my heart. I have only this season to enjoy this part of who I was created to be. If I fail, I will miss it, undeniably and irrevocably.
To be sure, there are plenty of clichés to toss around regarding this renaissance or cathartic overture to la vie en rose, but I think I’ll abstain. There is a freedom I find when one will simply absolve themselves of the irrational and unreasonable bars we set for ourselves at unrealistic heights.
This epiphany is not a license to slack off. No, certainly it isn’t. I’ve never been very good at slacking off. (A long since diagnosed over-achiever, I can’t sleep when I feel I’m not doing my best.) Rather this realization seems more in line with giving yourself permission to live a life you enjoy and to work hard at preserving the joie de vivre that goes along with it. For without this, I fear that life becomes little more than a chore, a checklist of to-do’s that never seems to get shorter despite our sweat and strain.
Perhaps this translates as an exercise in literary homiletics. Perchance it is because the dear friend who shared with me how he marvels at his created nature is a pastor that his tone has pervaded these pages. Regardless of my muse, I sincerely believe that what Anne Shirley says to Gilbert Blythe at the end of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea sums my point up nicely.
“It’s just that I went looking for my ideals outside myself. I’ve discovered it’s not what the world holds for you. It’s what you bring to it. The dreams dearest to my heart are right here.” Judging from all I’ve lived and learned up to this moment, I suspect the bottom line is, at the end of any of our days, rich or poor, young or old, man or woman, the race is only with ourselves. To not actively seek out joy in the life that purposefully was created for us is a misuse of the gift.
We as a consumptive race go scrambling about trying to ingest from the world as much as we can, afraid that we won’t ever get enough or as much as the next guy. We walk an imaginary line trying to personify some standard of what it truly means to be “male” or “female” prescribed by goodness only knows who and yet we fail to actually meet ourselves in the process.
What seems to have been forgotten is that the real joy comes when we take the time to give the best of who we are and what we’re made of back into the world; to our children, our grandparents, our spouses, and ourselves. Will we spend our entire lives taking as much as we can rather than appreciating the world as it was fashioned or valuing the simple beauty in ourselves as we have been created; artistically and purposefully? When the sun sets on my brief race through this lifetime I want to know that I took the time to enjoy it and to make it enjoyable in kind. That being said, I think that I’ll walk this lap, and savor the scenery for a change.
Well there’s always dear old Merriam-Webster which states the obvious, “To cause to exist; bring into being,” but that’s not very inspirational. Sure the old B-I-B-L-E says that in God’s image we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” but again, I ask you…what does it mean? Okay, I promise I’m not about to launch into some creepy diatribe about the meaning of life, Aristotle’s theory on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God or anything so mundane. For mercy’s sake it IS only Monday.
I will say, however, that another definition of the word created did strike a cord with me in a way I never would have seen until today. The same dictionary, in its 4th definition defines the word created as a verb meaning, “To produce through artistic or imaginative effort.” The key words that stood out in my mind are artistic and effort. Somewhere, somehow, regardless of your personal convictions or belief system, each of our lives has been created. The evidence is, well, self-evident. There you are. But the notion that this has happened with effort, that we were artistically produced, tells me that it’s on purpose. Life is no accident.
Now, personally, I’ve had a bit of a go of things lately. Since my last entry I’m no longer locked in the dungeon of corporate America. I was “down-sized” for “budgetary purposes.” I thought I was bitter…but now that I’m gainfully employed elsewhere, my perspective on a lot of things have changed. In some ways that’s natural. But in other ways, it’s taken a conscious effort to see past my own foregone conclusions about the process of life to see the reality of life for its own good sake.
What I mean is…I’ve looked at this created life of mine; what it has been up to now, where I am this minute and what I hope it will be in the future. All the usual rigmarole comes to light. Health, wealth and prosperity, but that’s only natural. Everyone is a relative subscriber to Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. What I’m finding is, even though mathematically, the quickest way from point A to point B is a straight line; life is not geometry.
It’s a convoluted process this coming into one’s own. I laugh at the many versions of myself that I thought I had figured out. As a high school senior I wanted to be a physical therapist. As a college freshman I was enthralled with languages and astronomy. And I’ll never quite forget the day I tripped over a knapsack in Saint Thomas Hall and smacked right into the poster on the wall of the graduate school I would attend the very next academic year.
Life, as I’m learning, is a process of reinventing yourself. Not for the sheer need to bend to the will of those who keep you in their employ. No…it’s more a factor of continual self-discovery.
Sitting now, in my office at a marketing firm in Georgetown Harbour, I’m munching calmly on sushi and potato chips. I have no pressing engagements for the afternoon and I aspire to get to the gym this evening as I am on one of my health kicks again.
Finding contentment where one is at is a virtue, I believe. For a young woman such as myself who, since age 13, and probably before, has been pushed and nudged and challenged to succeed and excel and blow the doors off the world at large, it’s come as quite a shock that, right now, my Creator requires of me nothing more than to be silent, simple and still. And where silence and stillness are not so much the challenge, simple, in a world of drama queens and Jerry Springer scenarios, is less attainable.
You see I fall within a range of young people just at the bitter end of generation-X and not quite within the same frame of mind as the generation-next. We are the founders of the quarter-life crisis, the survivors of the dot COM revolution and the victims of the corporate chasm and hiring freeze generated by the War on Terror.
We have Master’s degrees, some of us, Doctoral degrees. We work 50 hours a week for forty thousand dollars a year and we all have an average of fifty thousand dollars in college loan debt. Myself, I boast a bit above the average…but who’s counting?
We are commitment-phobic. Marriage is no longer a social norm, monogamy is easily scoffed at and singleness…for my fellow ladies out there, is viewed more often than not as a season in purgatory, to quote Josh Harris, rather than a time during which we can simply enjoy getting to know ourselves.
Yes it’s an interesting age. But I think, perhaps, I’ve decided I don’t wish to subscribe to this norm any longer. I don’t want to work 50 hours a week for people who hate each other and say loathsome things about you, me and everybody under the guise of raising money or lobbying the Appropriations Committee to make up the short-fall of Fiscal Year funding.
No. No I think perhaps, in a world, which all my life has demanded excellence of me in terms of productivity, I turn now to myself and decide to produce a more mentally and spiritually healthy and prepared human being. Not as a means of steeling up against a destabilized job market but, rather, to contend with the face in the mirror.
It’s a good thing to have knowledge, but wisdom and knowledge, I’m learning, simply aren’t the same. Gaining wisdom has shifted my priorities to aspire to a lifestyle and work ethic that has less to do with gathering an abundance of ‘stuff.’ Rather, I believe this is a time in my life to make good memories again. Like a born-again childhood, I can look at age twenty-something and even perhaps 30 something and know I don’t need to have all the answers today. To find these answers I’ll need to embrace many adventures and mysteries in days to come. Wide-eyed trepidation and nervous anticipation for what lies ahead on the road of life should not be gone by one’s mid twenties.
You see I realized that I have the entirety of my life to toil away on analysis of legislative strategy initiatives and policy briefs, homework and lesson planning. I do not, however, have the rest of my time to enjoy being a young woman, falling in love as an adult for the first time, traveling, having a home of my own and trying one last time to know the family I love with all my heart. I have only this season to enjoy this part of who I was created to be. If I fail, I will miss it, undeniably and irrevocably.
To be sure, there are plenty of clichés to toss around regarding this renaissance or cathartic overture to la vie en rose, but I think I’ll abstain. There is a freedom I find when one will simply absolve themselves of the irrational and unreasonable bars we set for ourselves at unrealistic heights.
This epiphany is not a license to slack off. No, certainly it isn’t. I’ve never been very good at slacking off. (A long since diagnosed over-achiever, I can’t sleep when I feel I’m not doing my best.) Rather this realization seems more in line with giving yourself permission to live a life you enjoy and to work hard at preserving the joie de vivre that goes along with it. For without this, I fear that life becomes little more than a chore, a checklist of to-do’s that never seems to get shorter despite our sweat and strain.
Perhaps this translates as an exercise in literary homiletics. Perchance it is because the dear friend who shared with me how he marvels at his created nature is a pastor that his tone has pervaded these pages. Regardless of my muse, I sincerely believe that what Anne Shirley says to Gilbert Blythe at the end of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea sums my point up nicely.
“It’s just that I went looking for my ideals outside myself. I’ve discovered it’s not what the world holds for you. It’s what you bring to it. The dreams dearest to my heart are right here.” Judging from all I’ve lived and learned up to this moment, I suspect the bottom line is, at the end of any of our days, rich or poor, young or old, man or woman, the race is only with ourselves. To not actively seek out joy in the life that purposefully was created for us is a misuse of the gift.
We as a consumptive race go scrambling about trying to ingest from the world as much as we can, afraid that we won’t ever get enough or as much as the next guy. We walk an imaginary line trying to personify some standard of what it truly means to be “male” or “female” prescribed by goodness only knows who and yet we fail to actually meet ourselves in the process.
What seems to have been forgotten is that the real joy comes when we take the time to give the best of who we are and what we’re made of back into the world; to our children, our grandparents, our spouses, and ourselves. Will we spend our entire lives taking as much as we can rather than appreciating the world as it was fashioned or valuing the simple beauty in ourselves as we have been created; artistically and purposefully? When the sun sets on my brief race through this lifetime I want to know that I took the time to enjoy it and to make it enjoyable in kind. That being said, I think that I’ll walk this lap, and savor the scenery for a change.
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