Some of us worry over what we're going to do after we are graduated from school, if we are graduated, or what we'll do with our lives "when we grow up."
I would like to open a discussion on this topic. Whether you hate books, and just like to work with your hands, or you like both book and physical learning and doing, or you just don't know what the hell you're going to do with yourself next year or even tomorrow, I would like you to consider how education and career affect each other and you as a person, as a future mother, father, uncle, loner, leader, follower...
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Sewing your wild oatsVoted for by cafegroundzero.
A young man wrote:
"If you pay for all these classes and use none of them, then what did you accomplish?"
First, I would like you all to consider seriously why we assume that we have to use everything we're taught. Why is something "useful" and what is it that we hope to "gain" in life? Secondly, I'd like you to consider how life can give to a person the strangest twists and turns, ups and downs. How predictable is life, after all? There is such a thing as specializing too much. There have been people who strive so much to be "useful," and become very much so, but in some instances they find they have become a tool, an automaton, a machine. Or they find the economy, society, or a set of circumstances change, leaving that person high and dry. You are worrying so much about your utility that you are missing the enjoyment of life. You're wasting precious youth trying to understand what is beyond anyone's complete grasp, which is the future. Your best bet is to have a Liberal Arts education, combined with maybe a few vocational skills which you can work in there, especially by on the job training or a two year technical institute, in between spring and fall, in winter break. Thereby, you'll develop that creative thinking, flexibility, ability to learn that is so essential to a changing world. You'll also have a set of practical skills which you can use anytime, anywhere, while you're looking for that career path which feels best to you. ___If you like to work with your hands, you might develop carpentry skills, plumbing, pipefitting, masonry, mechanics, so that no matter what else, you'll always be employable. If you prefer mental or indoor, consider word and data input, software applications, medical, legal, or business transcribing. Learn a foreign language or two. ___Then let yourself take the studies which will make you a deeper person, which will open areas of knowledge to you that may help you with critical thinking, logic, systems thinking, process theory, ethics, the law and justice, whatever takes your fancy. Take some art, some music. You may find that later you're too busy for this, and will be glad you learned something to carry with you for the rest of your life. ___In the industrial, technological, and corporate business societies we have far too many persons who have sold their souls to Mammon, to the military-corporate complex, to the Stepfords, the Springfields of the world. They get up, have their quick breakfast while reading their processed propaganda sheets, listening to the same top forty songs, going to work along the same rat-mazes to the same strip malls and office complexes. Now we have people cocooning in their pods, hooking up to feed their minds with the same pre-digested pap, as they watch the same circus on the same cable or satellite networks. Do I digress? Maybe. But my point is that now you have the time to explore, to open your mind, to free your mind, before you go plug yourself into that vast illusion, like Neo in the Matrix. Don't give up your chance for a little playground of the mind, before you march it into that gulag of socioeconomic pragmatism and propriety.
You mention that you would like to go trek? Your fiancee is against this now? If you let yourself get confined like this now, it may be your last chance. Why wait until your an aging codger to go see your country, to see the world? What good are all those years of travel, for you to then troop around in whatever version of a fuel-guzzling recreational van is then available, if we have still peace and prosperity? Will we even have the same world, the same freedom, then?
Look how much America, how much the world, has changed since Tulsa, since the Twin Towers, since Bali, London,and Madrid, since the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy attacks. Do you think you'll have the same country side, the same cities, the same peace and prosperity then? Will you even be alive then? Will you be strong and healthy to be able to get about, to see, to taste, to listen to the sounds, the music, the voices, the singing of the birds?
I did this homeless thing you're talking about. I could have gone to stay with my parents or uncle at any time, but I wanted both not to be a burden to my family, and to also see the country, the world, with my own eyes, experience it through my own senses. What I found was sometimes marvellous, amazing, and sometimes downright scary. I met wonderful people, including Jesse Jackson, Amy Carter, John Glenn, Joe Walsh, Bono, Governor Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Meat Puppets. And I experienced all sorts of adventures and hardships, and some very luxurious experiences. I camped in forests, swamps, mountains. I climbed mountains. I flew in helicopters, jumbo jets, and Cessnas, across fields, prairies, deserts, snow bound mountains and glaciers. I lived in tenements and shelters in inner cities. I slept under porches and in trees.
Now I have a family, including a wife and two children. We have our own house, land, jobs, and investments. Now I've got responsibilites. But I don't regret anything. I enjoyed my youth. I made mistakes, and I claim responsibility for all that I did. I don't have to envy anyone their freedom or wealth. My adventures were some of the most valuable stock I own.
Now let go, and let yourself live. Read The Razor's Edge, by Somerset Maugham, if you haven't already. And let us know how life turns out.
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