Posted by jonvon on November 13, 2004 at 16:21:31:
In Reply to: the power of God on the inside posted by J on November 05, 2004 at 12:59:58:
i remember a friend of mine talking about how he had done extremely well in elementary, junior and high school in music and in band, he had won and awards and so forth, about how music had always been this really primary thing in his life, but if you asked him what he was going to do with himself when he was in high school he would have said "marine biologist", even that interest for him was definitely secondary. he was interested in the water, he grew up in a place that was on the coast, but still it should have been obvious to him that music was the thing.
in college he figured it out after a while, and majored in jazz composition.
now of course he is a computer geek and spends most of his time doing that. so he can pay his mortgage and stuff. but he is still recording, he has a regular "recording night" every thursday that takes place at his house. he has a home studio there.
in a perfect world he would be doing music full time, i guess. except that he does seem to enjoy the computer stuff an awful lot.
*shrug*
when i was in the eighth grade, we were graduating from elementary school. it was a catholic school, and Tampa Catholic starts at 9th grade, so i was never really in a junior high so to speak. anyway, when we graduated they gave me the "Prize for Literature". i was very surprised. i had no clue it was coming, none at all. and since it was the prize for "eighth grade graduation" i don't think i took it very seriously.
still though, maybe i should have been a little more awake to it in some way.
in high school i started writing poetry. when i was a senior i had a very wonderful english teacher. i will never forget her reading Tennyson's Ulysses to us. "I will drink life to the lees!" she would shout, her face all red and her eyes looking like they had seen some ineffable power at the center of what it is to be human. like she had seen god or some angel. something that had changed her. her sight had changed her. something changed in me that year, i knew i wanted to write.
well i sort of knew it.
did i major in english? nope. i considered it for a short time. i did take some writing classes though. i had enough credits, i probably only needed one or two classes to get a minor. but i ended up majoring in business.
why? who knows. the soul has a strange way of working out its destiny. i needed to major in business. i learned a lot of stuff about life, and it made me a more confident person. that was something i needed pretty desperately. i guess life is more than just vocation. it is a tapestry. there are a lot of important things to do.
so after i graduated i got a job at chase manhattan. i did finance stuff for a few years. the second year i was there worked in a group called "the mortgage analytics group". we crunched numbers. we referred to the group as MAG, and everyone called us The Maggots. this was about the time i met steve and cari, btw.
i worked with some extremely brilliant people at chase. they were all better at that stuff than i was. so much so, i realized i was going to have a hard time making it in that industry. i didn't want to settle, i wanted to be the best at what i did. i just didn't have the depth as a math person.
we all got fired. there was a big merger and the operations in tampa got dismantled. i got a severance check and some money for stock options, and i paid off my debts, bought a computer, and decided to go on sabbatical. i wanted to see a bit of the world.
so i left town. went to atlanta. became a technical writer. i wrote for a living for about two years. i got deeper and deeper into the technical stuff, and eventually started writing code. i realized as i was doing the tech writing that all i was really doing was reporting about stuff that other people were building. in other words, the creative people were the engineers. they were the ones breaking new ground, inventing things that no one had ever seen before. i was not creating anything at all. about the only thing i did that was creative was to work on the layout for the manual i was working on.
i got bored with tech writing, in other words, and so i stopped writing for a living.
so now i am writing code, every day, all day long, except on weekends of course.
BUT
i am working on a novel.
something about writing has always scared the crap out of me, on some very personal ontological level. tech writing didn't scare me. there wasn't any personal cost. the occasional poem didn't scare me. but writing an entire book, something about that did.
i wonder if our vocation, when we find it, if we are not quite ready for it, i wonder if it is scary to us. it was for me. still is in fact. i am learning to push through it though.
somehow being a father and having a somewhat predictable life, a life that i decided to live and to sustain, has evened something out in me. being home every night for my wife and my daughter has settled me. i can finally begin to write without being afraid of myself, or of the process. i'm a lot more ok with me than i ever have been.
so now i am still writing code, but i am writing. i mean, i've been writing all this time, but its been email, and the odd poem here and there, and long diatribes on message boards, and blog entries, and so on. a short story here and there, that always ended up getting halted somehow.
another thing that happened that started me on doing the novel, i got published in an online magazine, a trade magazine that covers the industry surrounding the product that i work in. they liked my stuff a lot, and told me so. in fact i ended up writing another article for them that they also published.
something about that ended up pushing me to believe that i could do more. that i could do what i really wanted to do more than anything else in the world. which is write novels.
so now i am writing my first one. i have a good feeling about it. like it is going to get finished. and then from there, published. i hope, anyway. i am going to do my best. we'll see what happens.
i am happier now than i have ever been. soul happy. i am writing just what i want to be writing, and i am taking care of my family at the same time. this for me is peace, to a degree i have never known till now.