Looking for my Sheep

I'm finally able to verbalize why I am persuing a degree that is quite unnecessary and possibly silly for my career. :)

Adair Lara, a newspaper columnist whom I quite enjoyed (before her column was discontinued when my hometown newspaper decided that they needed their columnists to be younger and hipper, hrrmph!), once wrote:

"If you're like my son Patrick, you want to know what you're for, what your special gifts are. He makes me think of my dog Cody. Cody snaps at our heels, trying to get us to turn. He doesn't know why he does that because he doesn't know he's a sheepdog, born to herd sheep. He doesn't know what he's for. I bet he will find out in a hurry if we ever come across some sheep.

"Watch for your sheep."

Yeah, working dogs are awesome like that. Have you ever seen how well an urban dog takes to his breed's calling, even when he's never known it in his life? Take a collie, or even a corgi, and put him in a pen full of sheep or goats. His face will light up, and he'll round them up into a corner. Do you know what the most difficult command is to teach a sled dog? "Whoa" or "stop" or "slow down." There is a common vocabulary that all sled dogs learn (i.e., "gee" for right, "haw" for left, "whoa" for slow down), but there is one word that they just don't need. 'Go.' The most common command for 'go' is "Okay." Seriously! You release their brakes, and all they need is for you to permit them to go, and they take off, with joy lighting up their faces!

I'm not sure that humans work this way, but I have to confess that I've never felt that sort of passion about anything before and I wonder if I can just find the right calling, it will happen for me. Don't get me wrong--I love being an engineer, and I love studying physics. I am very proud of my chosen career, and I've met such wonderful people and learned such wonderful things! But at the end of any given day or week or month, I will have to tell you that my happiest moments were ones that have nothing whatsoever to do with work or school. Driving the Eastbound Dumbarton at sunrise. Sleeping in and snuggling up against Dan on a Sunday morning. My long runs and walks with Autumn on our snowy trails, as I marvel over the red sun hanging low on the horizon. I love school and am doing well in school, and I've loved most of my Sili Valley jobs, especially my recent ones. But the things that give me joy are not those, and I wonder if I might have a true calling out there somewhere.

It's silly and artificial, I know. I've met quite a few people in Chinese factory towns who work the most tedious jobs imaginable, but they live happy lives simply because they make good wages compared to their hometowns, and they have no familial obligations in their daily lives. On weekends the young people fill the streets, their arms linked, laughing and gossiping, although the streets are filled with rubble and dirt and soot from the factories. It's silly to think that each of us has some higher intellectual calling, so I feel somewhat embarrassed and spoilt, to admit that that was part of what I was chasing when I came here. But I think deep down, that was part of it.

I am fortunate to be a happy, if discontent, person by nature. I can honestly tell you that I had a happy childhood, even though objectively it was pretty bad. My family didn't have a lot of money, and my mother was always stressed out and sometimes lashed out at us kids. I was picked on mercilessly by other school kids because I was nerdy and weird, and I didn't have any friends. And yet... I remember being a happy kid.

More and more, I realize that happiness is a trait of character and not of circumstance. We all know people who should be happy and who are not. And we all know people who should not be happy and who are.

I've been happy. But I still keep trying...