Passions or stability?

A couple days ago my good friend posted a blog post about following your dreams. It is a thought-provoking post. I think many of us are torn in the desire to "pursue our passion" (perhaps not-lucrative ones) and the desire to lead a stable life, with a steady income. I feel like society sends us a lot of mixed messages. Like "Pursue your passion!!!", but at the same time, societal norms dictate that the American Dream includes a mortgage (and recently it seems that it demands a mortgage on a house that is really too big). With so many mixed messages being sent it's hard to know what to think.

I have found it a challenge to reconcile my passions and the desire to live a lifestyle where I can afford the things I need, and live within my means, all while not living in a box under a bridge. At the same time I also struggle with the idea of finding a "passion" that I can pursue as a career, that I'm both passionate enough about to do 40 hours a week, and yet not so passionate about that I'd hate spending 40 hours a week doing it. I'll admit that I also never really imagined myself as having a career. I'm not sure what I imagined, because I've known for sometime that I will most likely need to work the majority of my adult life, but I've just never envisioned a career. That's kind of a big scary word. Career. It sounds so final, and so irreversible. Even though I know that's not true. I remember hearing a statistic once when I was a freshman in college that for people my age they were likely to have approximately 8-10 major career changes in their life. That news stunned me. I had never imagined changing careers every 4 of 5 years. I still have a hard time imagining that. I mean, after you look at the nearly 20 years I've put in to educating myself for this one career, I really hope it sticks. But at the same time it seems a little ludicrous to ask a bunch of twenty year olds to know themselves enough for them to pick a career they're going to be happy in for 35 or 40 years. Things change. When I was 18, I wanted to be a high school band director. Then I wanted to be a museum curator (actually I still think that'd be cool). And then I moved on to other things... Even in the one year that I've been in library school (which has a fairly obvious career destination--librarian) I've changed what I want to be several times (did you know that there are about a million different kinds of librarians?). I'm still not sure what I'll end up as when I rejoin the world of gainfully-employed people.

I think pursuing your passion perhaps has more to do with creating a lifestyle that allows you to have all your priorities in balance and that gives you opportunities to be your best self, than about choosing between a single passion and some kind of stability.

I've been thinking a lot about lifestyles lately as I'm getting to a point where I think that the light I see ahead is actually the end of the tunnel, not just an oncoming train. Before I started grad school I worked professionally for a year, and the lifestyle I led then would never have been sustainable in the long term.  And so I'm trying now to develop a lifestyle that is sustainable--and it's hard. But I think that when you hit the right balance of work/life/hobbies/etc, then you can find fulfillment and both be following your passion and leading a life with the stability you want.

Nightmares

I was talking to one of my roommates last night about how many dystopian novels have some part of their premise focused around living your worst fear. And that got me to wondering what my worst fears are--well it got me wondering for about 5 minutes because then I went to bed and forgot about the whole conversation.

This morning I woke up at approximately 6:30 from a rather vivid dream that I was working and it was closing time and no one would leave. I'd told the patrons several times that it was time to go, and the PA announcements had happened. And I knew I wasn't handling it very well because I was starting to get very short with the patrons and turning computers off before their very eyes and such. It was dreadful. I woke up and it took me a moment to realize that it was just a dream, it hadn't happened, my problem patrons weren't being especially problematic. What a nightmare.

Apparently my dream self thinks that my biggest fear is of patrons not leaving the library at closing time...

Transatlantic Oceanliners

One of my dreams in life is to cruise on the Queen Mary 2. I think that a nice transatlantic cruise from New York to Southampton (or Southampton to New York) would be fabulous. I love the idea of a week at sea, and eating good food while I read books, and dressing for dinner every night. And the Cunard line is the company to cruise with. They've been in the oceanliner business for ages and they are the top of the line. I got to see the QM2 in dock in Boston a couple of weeks ago. It was a gorgeous ship, and much, much larger than I had imagined. I hope one day that I can sail on her. Unfortunately, most of the people I know who enjoy cruising are more interested in the ports of call than the days-at-sea. So not too many people think that my transatlantic trip with only days-at-sea sounds too exciting. And besides, it's incredibly expensive. I could go on several cruises on other lines for the price of this one cruise. But someday...