State of Things

Do I want to do this? That is the question I avoid answering again and again. With myself and my family, I have been far more explicit in response: “No. I don’t want to be doing this. I’m not happy.” Yet, I am not so outspoken with everyone; and people keep asking. Is this what I want to be doing? I don’t know if anyone else gets asked this.

The reason I’m doing this, the reasons I have willed myself to keep going, are twofold: I need a job, and I foresee a need to have a trade with the way the world is turning.

I’ve had more fun doing other things, things that didn’t pay well or offered much hope to save and retire. I found more meaning while at college, but I find I’m not an academic; I’ve never been able to give myself fully over to study, and, after a year of graduate school, I was haunted by a sense that I had to, and I don’t know the words to perfectly describe it, enter the world.

I’ve gotten into a trade school, am making good money (enough to buy most of the books I want), have time to work on my writing projects, but time and again, whatever boss or teacher I’m working with asks me that fateful question I am too scared to answer publicly, “Do I want to be doing this?”

It is God’s blessing. There are many who want to and are striving to get into this trade, yet I, in comparison, basically stumbled into it while they were left waiting.

Christ was a carpenter, a fellow tradesman, and it is almost inconsequential to who He was and what He did. As Chesterton notes, though, He might have built his own cross. I build my own horrors, working in a city I hate building ugly buildings where there was once beauty. I don’t want to be doing this, but I do. I don’t like doing it, but doing it helps me do the things I want to do. I feel like Cpt. Jack Sparrow staring down at his magical compass and finding no direction while death is always creeping nearer.