Boxed. Labeled. Nah!
Sometimes I feel like that person standing in front of the dam (damn) wall and just as I’ve plugged the one leak another one starts. I was going to do this whole long post about what’s currently going on in my head, you know, because getting stuff out always helps. I’m feeling terribly insecure at the moment, and you know what, I must just put my big girl panties on and deal with it. Things change. I know this. So I’m not going to post about all that is going on in my head. I’m just going to deal. A good religious experience might sort me out!
Yesterday I came across this quote from Anais Nin. Gosh I love her writing, what an amazing woman she was. It said:
“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.” ~ Anais Nin
Apart from the millions of other things. This has been on my mind lately. And I have to say that I completely agree with Anais here. In my book, every experience you have, you learn something. And it doesn’t matter what the circumstances of that experience is. Once we can recognize that, that it’s a gift and we learn something, life becomes a tad more comfortable and we stop beating ourselves up so much over perceived ‘mistakes’. Nobody is perfect. But your attitude is what determines the quality of your experiences.
There are so many things I am interested in and are good at. Maybe it’s a good thing that I never had the opportunity to go to varsity. I would either have become a student for life or would have been miserable doing the one job I studied for. Who and what is to say that we should only have one job. I guess it makes it easier for the proverbial them, because then we can all be neatly boxed and labeled. But me, I shudder at the thought of being labeled because of the job I do. What I do to get paid doesn’t define me. I can’t get my head around doing the same job for the rest of my life. Not when there is so much to learn and experience out there. That’s the great thing about us humans, we are diverse in our talents. Now sure there are certain disadvantages not being qualified in one specific thing. And if I could decide exactly what it is I wanted to go study I would probably go do it. But I just can’t decide on one thing and as we all know it’s really expensive to study. A good investment yes, but not something that you can waste money on.
I wonder how many of us are frustrated in what we do for a living because it doesn’t fulfill us. Because we have been brainwashed into believing, thou shalt only have one profession. I am working towards making money from ALL the things that interest me. I figure that would sort me out on the job satisfaction front. I have no desire to ‘fit in’. I want to live an extraordinary life. Time is a ticking and there’s no time for wasting.
