Walking the Wall

I was turning 27 when I drove up a half hour to our community college to sign up for my first semester classes–I cried all the way home. I know how that sounds: mushy, sentimental, silly, gaggy. But the truth is, I cried all the way home. Joseph Campbell wrote a great deal about following your bliss–it’s become a bit of a catch phrase. Bliss is defined as “Identifying that pursuit which you are truly passionate about and attempting to give yourself absolutely to it. In so doing, you will find your fullest potential and serve your community to the greatest possible extent.” He said about it: “If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of trac that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

For me, going to college to pursue literature and writing was following what I was truly passionate about–and 11 long years later as I come to the end of the first part of my degree seeking (bachelors degree), it is something that I am even more passionate about. Yes, it has taken a long time, and yes, I tell my daughter to do what I say and not what I did–get that degree first, then get married and have children. Still, I don’t regret this slower path because I have an appreciation for my education that I may not have had before and the luxury of knowing exactly what I want which I probably didn’t have at 18 years old.

Last Tuesday I went through interviews for getting a graduate assistantship and the questions only renewed that sense of purpose and of being where I am supposed to be, working towards doing what I am supposed to be doing. Wednesday, I received my formal acceptance into graduate school and while I didn’t cry all the way from the mailbox–there was the same sense of rightness and of doing what I should be doing that I felt 11 years ago.

There are many other choices I could have made, and considered making, that might have made me more money, more security, more options–but I knew that I would be in my early 40s when I would be shifting fully into that new career. By most people’s definition of living a long life, I would be going into the “second half of the rest of my life” and I wanted to be doing something that was important to me, that had value, that had me following my bliss.

Now I just need to get through the rest of this semester when motivation becomes an act of digging deep and summer break is looking like the real bliss!