February 1, 2005

• Topic: Just trying to make sense of it all

  
  

  I went to a potluck dinner w/ about 15 other experiential educators last night.  We went around in a circle introducing ourselves, then tried to hear as many stories as possible from people such as the Indian couple who were starting a program here to bring people to the Himalayas to go hiking  and to re-create schools in an innovative way.  I talked parenting for the first time in my life w/ a recent mother, who did an experiment w/ her 4months old and saw how she cried when the tv in the house was turned off, and so she and her husband decided that they didn’t want their child exposed to tv for at least a few years.  There was the deer hunter who made some delicious venicen meatballs, the rock climber who died and was resucitated from a car accident, the corporate Outward bound instructor who runs courses for people from the World Bank, and the gracious host, a 60-year old asian woman who orgnanized this for me to meet everyone, who did a PhD on experiential education, and concluded that experiential ed. is a process of healing, or making something whole…educating the whole person.  The evening made me realize that I’ve been living so completely isolated from the types of people I most relate to, and as I start to surround myself more and more w/ people w/ similar philosophies of education as myself, I expect my learning to grow more than I’ve ever dreamed. 

  
  

  From digging to understand history and politics, to digging to understand my own self…I think the latter topic is equally if not more important, yet it’s harder to do because nobody has done research on ME, to help me understand myself, so I’m left to analyze my life in the most amateur fashion.

  
  

  Knowledge – I sometimes feel like I’m drowning in ignorance.  I try to simplify life to spiritual things, like following your passions, and making the most of it…but by sitting on a mountain contemplating “life,” as in, what does it mean to live, a person is essentially learning nothing about “life,” as in, what makes certain things in the world operate as they do?

  
  

  I often feel that my attempts to understand how the world operates are futile.  There is simply too much to know…but then I recall how much has become clear to me in just a few months…if I could just focus on reading a few books cover to cover instead of jumping all over the place, I might come to learn a bit more.

  
  

  Transitions – Well…my personal life is all over the place.  It’s like flying on a trapeze…I’m in that scary place where I’m in the air, and I know I’ll catch the next bar, but right now I just feel myself unsupported. 

  
  

  Here’s an update.  I got a job today!!!  A job that I should be totally psyched about, I got hired to be an Outward Bound instructor here in Baltimore, for Chesapeak Bay Outward Bound, which is an urban center that does courses w/ public school students.  But…after I left the base camp today, I felt less than thrilled, in fact, I was more confused than anything. 

  
  

  I like working towards seemingly unattainable tasks.  While my new job will be amazing in many ways, and my pessimism will disappear once I become friends w/ the people working there, it still isn’t big enough for me.  I think working in Baltimore isn’t as exotic or sexy as I would have hoped, but like most things I’ve gone after, it simply presented itself to me.  On top of that, all I can think about, is that while I just got accepted for a job that I’d have considered a dream job a few months ago, there’s so many other dream jobs I want to do…I guess the point is, it’s good to be a dreamer, but at some point you have to live those dreams.  In a weird way, that’s my problem, not looking at the opportunity at my feet, and instead thinking about other opportunities.

  
  

  Anyways…I haven’t been writing in my real journal, and that tells me something.  That says my life is stale.  My days are uneventful.  I become lonely w/ my thoughts…when I should be harnassing them.  If you were inside my head today, you’d say, “man, what a sad kid,” but I feel compelled to learn from these moments, and to see if this metaphorical hike down the unbeaten path, is revealing anything important.  At the moment, I feel like I’m just plowing through a patch of thorny bushes, and I know there’s nobody but me to decide if I’m on the wrong path, or if this experience will help me down the road, or in fact lead to something great.

  
  

  Education – what I find most ironic, is how uselss school really is.  I think it’s great to see the debates going on on this site (and I need to read a book because I’m missing lots of key historic events), but we never see debates on a national level.  This is what it’s all about, making a case, finding common ground, finding gaps…to not use such an important tool as debate in society besides the joke of presidential debates, is beyond me.  The skills and knowledge from schools are to a large degree, completely irrelevant to real life, even if you go into the field that you studied, but especially for the large number of people who don’t. 

  
  

  All in all, I’m quite confused as to the direction of my life.  I’m still trying to figure out how to establish myself, how to find an open ear for my thoughts.  That’s ultimately why I’m taking this job, because Outward Bound to a large degree helped create the person I have become since college, and I know I have something to contribute.  My gut tells me that I should work the spring and summer seasons, to show a level of committment, even though I have all these false reasons to think that 6months will be too long.  To me, the idea of staying w/ one thing, even if you’re doing many things w/in that one thing, makes me feel like I’m not doing much.  Why do one job for 1+ years, when you can do many different things in the same time.  That’s the “twixter” in me I guess.

  • 2:01 am
  • 3 Comments