First Steps
I’ve been having trouble sustaining action. For any activity, the answer to the question do-I-want-to-be-the-kind-of-person-who-does-such-an-activity is always no. In disagreeable moods, I look out at the world and think: I don’t want to have written any of these books, or started any of these companies, or hosted any of these parties. I do not want to be a policy analyst or an academic or a priest. Nor do I want to spend my time making crafts, writing from the first-person perspective about my inner experience, or cooking elaborate meals for weeknight dinners. It’s a dumb state: I do, actually, want to do things in the world. But give me any specific example and I’ll spit.
The issue, maybe, is that taken on its own, each of these activities or identities reads as totalizing to me – as if, if I were an academic, all I would be was an academic. But certainly sewing a quilt would not mean that “hobbyist quilter” must dominate my image, much less my sense of self! We do lots of different things. If only a rich synthesis of activities, friendships, communities, and emotions is really going to sound desirable to me, that’s okay. But it is silly, then, to consider things I could do as if they were the only, or the most important, things I would do.
It is in the spirit of widening my considerations toward action that I start this website. Do I want to be a mediocre blogger? – Maybe I can be a mediocre blogger who wants to surprise herself, who hopes that if she writes more, maybe she’ll get better, who wants to have children but not yet, who analyzes enough to be a mathematician though not enough to be a philosopher, who cultivates rich relationships with friends in person… It doesn’t really matter, does it? The reason I’m starting this website is that the only way I can envision myself feeling content with any career is if I maintain an unrelated, substantial, interesting personal website on the side. Is that ridiculous? Maybe eventually I’ll come up with some other vision in which I’m proud of myself, I don’t know, maybe I don’t need a vision. Lacking that, though, I need to get started. So may these be the first steps!
May we find the agency in ourselves to take loving action in the world. May our varied commitments nourish and sustain us; may we yet have the wisdom to know what is most dear to us and the courage to prioritize. May we burn through our lighter interests to find new ones. And whether we doubt ourselves or not, may we be kind, and keep going.
