Over the past month or so I've taken a break from life and really relaxed. After a long run of 11 months of classes, I was long overdue for a vacation. Recently, I've spent a lot of time alone reading, writing, playing the guitar, cooking, and doing whatever else I needed to get reacquainted with rest. Prior to that mental vacation, I would wake-up with intense anxiety and hit the ground running and keep running until my body called it quits and I could no longer keep my eyes open.
Now recently, I've been coming to the point where I am fully rested and in need of stimulation, mental stimulation. In order to quench my mental thirst, I've been reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Saul Bellow's Something to Remember Me By, various things in the Bible, and a lot of news. More specifically, I've been thinking about our responsibility to each other politically, emotionally, and intellectually. I've been wondering what if anything I can do to contribute to the betterment of society and life. More concretely, where's my place here?
A few summers ago, after my first semester in college, I felt like I was actually contributing to US society. It was the first summer and probably the only time in my adult years that I've felt truly challenged intellectually. From reporting for the newspaper of my home town to working on the Veterans History Project for the Library of Congress, I genuinely felt like I was making a contribution. On top of those two jobs, I was also doing consulting work and was a program manager for a senior citizen center in that same town. The synapses had fired from my first semester and continued to blaze as I realized I could create my own challenges and continue to grow and stimulate myself outside of academia. And on a more personal level, my then boyfriend (a very handsome UC Berkley and Harvard grad)had been temporarily transferred to Florida. So I poured myself into my work sometimes waking up at 4:30 a.m. to write an article for the paper. That summer and the business encirlced in it were two fold, I wanted to be and continued to find avenues for challenge and wanted to busy myself so I didn't miss him too much. Later our relationship folded due to him not coming back to the area and I used my work again as a means of trying to "get on." Had he came back, there's a very likely chance that I would not still be single and unmarried, but that is neither here nor their.
So you might be wondering how this figures into the now? Well, I'm entering into a season of extreme mental thirst. A season where I need to push myself to feel fulfilled and to feel of use. I'm currently looking at a year of living outside of the ivory tower and needing to and exciting about creating my own avenues for growth. There isn't anyone in the picture to get over as there was before, but there are opportunities worth seizing. Within the next few months, I plan on getting equipment together to start working on the Veterans History Project again. I may also do some local news reporting. In the past, both were a good means of owning up to responsibility, intellectual responsibility, as well as a good means of touching people where they were and paying homage to their experiences and our history. Teaching and/or tutoring might somehow too fall into this mix.
Concerning the Veterans History Project,I understand that most of our troops coming back from Iraq will most likely not feel comfortable talking about the details of what they have seen and experienced from the war that is currently going on. Many of them may not be at liberty to speak in depth about their experiences,but I would like to give voice and audience to their stories as well as to any war-time veterans willing to speak concerning previous wars. Their stories need to be heard and I in part feel responsible to make sure that that happens and its time to act on that responsibility.
Too often those of us who live in the ivory tower for too long forget about the responsibility we have to our society and to our country. Just about anyone who's been to college has at some time or another become numb to the outside world and forgotten that they have a roll in the big picture. And as humans, we become myopic, thinking only about that which effects us directly. Relationships may blind us to the bigger picture, jobs may steal us away from time to invest in the bigger picture. Our future, not just our future as individuals is in question. So I ask you, what roll will you take? What path will you blaze? Or will you continue to walk sleepily through our world never touching the importance of the reality at hand?
After a long vacation and a trip away from the ivory tower, I woke up to the reality that our world needs us to act. So act...
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