That which you manifest is before you...

This is a quote from a book I recently read called "The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein. It's written in the perspective of a dog, and it completely charmed me. The dog, Enzo, longs to be human, and perceives the world (and people) around him with both a wistful longing and a bit of disdain. We humans can get it so wrong sometimes, he says. If he were human he would live better, stronger, faster (the theme is car racing), and with more vigor. Towards the end of the book he realizes that maybe life isn't as easy as he wants to believe. No kidding, Enz.

There were a few pearls of wisdom that I took from this book, including the quote above and another fave: "Your car goes where your eyes go." Meaning, keep focusing on what you want and eventually, somehow, you will get there. During a time when it's so easy to get sucked in by negativity and self-doubt, when the world seems so upside-down that you don't know where or how to put yourself right side-up, it helps to keep a little perspective. Sometimes it comes from a loved one -- human or animal -- other times it might just come from yourself.

I've been trying a combination of the two (or in this case, three), to get me through this bleak period of underemployment and job search ridiculosity. The kind words of encouragement (and occasional ass-kicking) by those who care about me has kept me moving along, whether at the pace of a lion or a slug, but moving nonetheless. When I've exhausted these resources (at least until they can be replenished with gratitude and baked goods), I turn to my other true love: reading.

My lifelong love affair with this unglamorous 'passatempo' began in the fourth grade. I won a school reading contest that left me beaming with such pride, my chest puffed with confidence and dare I say, arrogance -- I knew it would always be a part of me. And as a person whose eyes light up when revealing that she is a tried-and-true extrovert, reading has become a form of escapism and/or self-therapy in my adult life. It costs nothing (if I remember to return the library books on time), and it teaches me things about life, my deepest fears or desires, and even how to improve my relationship without making me feel like a moron. In short, it soothes and replenishes me.

My question for you, is, what have you read (or listened to) lately that has left you feeling triumphant, renewed, or simply -- alive? If you don't have an answer, perhaps you'll decide to try "The Art of Racing in the Rain?" See where your eyes take you.

One question too many?

What is my job on this planet with a Capital J?

I suppose that by just asking myself this question I am headed in the right direction, or at least towards an answer. But it can also appear that the more questions I ask myself, the more the answers seem to elude me. It’s so much easier to come up with questions than answers, until your mind is outnumbered, little white flags waving furiously in the hopes that the question marks will stop assaulting your purer, nicer thoughts. Or, at a party where there are so many girls and not enough boys, a social catastrophe that results in one or two awkward pairings moving around self-consciously on the dance floor, wondering why he chose me and he asking himself the same thing.

Needless to say, I just go around and around with this. There are so many jobs out there, how am I to know which one will best suit me, or my color? My aptitude? Fulfill the potential that almost everyone (Mom, teacher, Oprah) insists that I have? What if I don’t have all this supposed ‘potential’? And what did they do with their potential? Well, obviously Oprah turned out alright, but what if she really wanted to be a doctor all along?

Then what? Is she not doing her Job with a Capital J? Did she mistakenly answer someone else’s life Call?

See, more questions. Before you know it the page is filled with them, and the answers stand no chance of ever catching up.

This is the moment when a light bulb turns on and I tell myself—there doesn’t have to be an answer to every question. Even just understanding that there will always be more questions than answers is a revelation in and of itself! Yet, somehow, I’m not satisfied by this. Maybe I once learned that asking questions makes you look smart, or smarter, or the smartest. Raising your hand with the answer already brings you down a notch (or several notches, depending on how many times you raise your hand) on the social totem pole. Therefore, it’s cool not to have the answers, even more so if you keep asking questions that couldn’t possibly have an answer to begin with (how cool would you be if you asked an obvious question?).

Is there a job where I can ask questions all day??

Maybe a scientist. But I’m pretty sure their job is to actually get answers, and prove them over and over again. And I’d probably go crazy if I spent all this time discovering the answer to a pretty important question (scientists don’t come across as a frivolous bunch), then spent twice that amount of time making sure that I always got that answer, only to have some freak incident occur which would then force me to report a 99.9998% accuracy rate. That might make render me clinically insane, which is a lot less cool than mildly neurotic, as only true New Yorkers can pride themselves on being.

Back to the question(s?) at hand. What is my Job with a Capital J? Well, let me ask you, what is yours?

(The question at hand is taken from the book Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. And no, Jess, I did not make up that title, but I wish that I had.)