A Part-Time Ambition?

Good question to ask about what careers we may want.

I thought it would be a writer.

I thought it would be a traveller.

Both are privileged roles that seem to benefit from a patron, to possess a position free from responsibility. But such roles cannot be a foundation for a life. Such roles in their ‘purest’ form leave the writer or traveller free of the flaws that life demands: a partner, children, a job. They cut into writing and travelling time. Yet without the demands of life, what would a writer really have to write about?

In some Africa philosophy, a person is only a person through other people.

The kind of people I knew from my family led selfish lives. My father would cancel the few birthdays we tried to organise. To organise my parties after leaving home was a defiant and sacrilegious affair, always conducted with the stressful tension of swimming against what I had always known.

Career-wise as a youth, I wanted to be satisfied with matters other than success. I remember thinking that promotions and money were tricks for fools that distracted from the innerlife. Yet as I near death I need to leave some interaction with the world. Either a life, literature or some resonance of who on earth I might be.

At birth we enjoy an infinite potential of possibilities. As we grow older, our life becomes more situated - our choices are closed off for partners, jobs, hobbies etc, doors of other jobs or other partners are closed. But those things that remain seem innately significant, regardless of their quality or objective worth.

The desire for freedom in the Western world has dislocated us from some useful experiences. The nuclear family - a supposed freedom from place and connection to kinship - is inadequate in raising children. Total sovereignty over ourselves is rarely achieved, and Eastern philosophies that aim for total self-discipline actually seek the destruction of ego. Instead, consider that some commitment, some love for a role, for people, for things, for finiteness in this world, and hope that might lead to satisfaction.

Part-time writer it is then ;-)