music: Something for Rockets- Something for Rockets
The dust has finally settled. I’m squarely entrenched in a quasi-normal living situation that falls squarely within the parameters of 21st century American social norms. Despite the various ideations and fantasies that have floated through my mind in the past four months, I’m not backpacking the Far East or South America, hiking a seriously long trail (as if the HST-JMT stroll were a short one…), squatting in converted warehouses or industrial buildings, or anything else that deviates too far from what is good and reasonable. No, despite the infinite possibilities, despite the steps I carefully took to ensure that I could really truly honestly do whatever I wanted, I played it safe. I’m now paying rent, receiving mail at a regular street address, buying groceries, paying bills. I have a job, I receive health and dental benefits, I own furniture. I am conscious of my allotment of daytime minutes on my telephone and the number of miles until I need to change the oil in my car. I do my dishes. I separate recycling from food waste from other trash. I am located in a major metropolitan area, with coffee shops, bars, and various commercial chain stores within walking distance. There is a steady stream of email coming into and out of my computer. I have picked up, moved, and unpacked, and in the resetting of my life 3,100 miles to the West I have, more or less, held to the same basic operating rules and assumptions I left behind. And now that the dust has settled, and I am able to survey the foundations I’ve laid here in San Francisco, I realize I’ve played it safe.
I’m sure that from some people’s viewpoint driving alone across the country with all your worldly posessions packed into a Toyota Camry is an enormous leap away from playing it safe. To me it was standard operating procedure. If anything, it was an appetizer, a small taste of what could be. If there ever were a time in my life to stray from societal norms it would be now: I am young, independent, unencumbered, relatively free of responsibilities, have a bit of money saved up…and look what I’ve gone and done. Got a job, a lease (albeit month-to-month), bills to pay, the whole domestic bit. And two weeks ago, once the dust began to settle in earnest, I started to think about going back to school.
Applying to grad school can be a full-time job, and I began to realze that applying to Ph.D. programs would prove much more involved, more intense, more specific and delicate than applying for a Masters was. It would be a minimum of four years, would involve a stipend in exchange for teaching undergraduates or assisting with research, it would culminate in my designing and conducting original reseach and scholarly work, contributing real and unique knowledge to the world. It would be an enormous commitment, as well as an enormous encumberence. Doctoral work and instruction at the post-secondary level is something that I want to do at some point in my life, but over the past couple days I realized that right now is not the time for it. I have always behaved well within the bounds of normal and expected action. I have played society’s game, and by most measures I have played it well: respectable colleges, well-paying jobs, a sparkling credit history, and the like. I have had a vague-yet-concrete roadmap of the likely path my life would take, born and cultivated in the suburbs of the Midwest and tempered in the intellectual soil of the Northeast, but there always has been an undercurrent of dissent, an interest in alternative living situations, a fascination with falling off the grid for a little bit.
After taking a small step in that direction this summer, and a small step back from that direction so far this fall, I have come to realize that jumping back into graduate study right now would be a step away from the momentum I’ve been building since rolling out of Boston and walking through the Sierras for a month. That I have resettled in a big city and almost immediately resumed paying rent and seeking employment is enough. I’ve taken an enormous pay cut for the sake of extra free time (and opportunities to spend my days outside in a National Park!) and pay about $500 per month more in rent than I have to in order to have access to certain opportunities. There are reasons why I have chosen to do what I have done, however passive and automatic, but now, more than ever, I’m fighting not only to maintain a philosophy of freedom but also practice freedom. Now, if ever in my life, is the time for it. And because of this I made the decison today as I was driving back from Los Angeles not to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2007.
There are more practical, mundane, concrete reasons. One, my GRE scores could use a boost. Two, the deadline for applications is in three weeks and I don’t know if I could reasonably get my letters of recommendation back in time. Three, I haven’t adequately researched programs and, more importantly, professors whose research aligns with my interest. Four, on an even broader scale, I haven’t narrowed down exactly what I would want to study and make my profession for the rest of my academic life (potentially the rest of my natural life). I know generally which fields of study I want to dip into, and know that I want my doctoral work (and all work for that matter) to have real-life impact and application, but until I can succinctly state what it is I want to study and how I believe it can impact the world-at-large, I have little reason to apply to doctoral programs. This all began to creep out some time last week when I sat down in front of my computer and began to draft a generic Statement of Purpose.
The Statement of Purpose is perhaps the most personal part of the Graduate School application, and the hardest piece to include. Graduate study is not something you jump at uncertainly in the same way you do when you apply for college out of high school. In applying for my masters, I had to narrowly focus my interest and intents, and as I started to try to piece together a Statement of Purpose for doctoral work, I found that I could not do it. An outright statement of your intentions, desires, goals, and aspirations as a potential doctoral student is a very hard thing to do preemptively. It should demonstrate commitment, interest, tenacity intellectual prowess, and reflect one’s willingness to work very, very, very hard. I realized quickly that I could not claim to possess all of these qualities at the present moment, perhaps because I just removed myself from a professional situation in which many of these qualities were demanded of me in such high quantity that I was drained of them by last June.
So instead of writing a Statement of Purpose that I would submit to graduate schools, I instead find it much more appropriate at the present time to make a simple statement of purpose here and now. And here it is:
I want do do everything I can. And since I’ve focused so much on the intellectual for as far back as I can remember, I want to do something else for a while.
Formal academics funnel you into tighter and tighter spirals; as you move on in school, your field of study gets narrower and narrower. And this is not the direction I need to be moving right now. One of the hardest things about growing up was having to make choices about what I would study, what I would do with myself, because with each decision made there is also avenues not taken, opportunities lost, doors closed. I am very glad to have studied psychology and education, to have taught high school and done biological and psychological research, to have worked in outdoor education. It may turn out that I do some or all of these things again. But I would have also liked to seriously indulge in other fields: music, engineering, river guiding, creative writing, political philosophy, computer science, ecology, exploration, cultural anthropology, carpentry, ethnomusicology…
I still want to do it all. I still have not given into the idea that life is finite and time is limited and that I won’t ever accomplish everything I would like to accomplish. Like Siddhartha(novel) I believe we are necessarily bound to different sorts of experience on the path towards enlightenment: the intellectual realm is only one of many. With the exception of two turbulent years following college, I have been in school for my entire life. So instead of committing to the highest form of intellectual training I could imagine, I instead want to take the near future and do other things. I want to make music, begin to compose more, study jazz theory and push my guitar playing to the next level. I want to hike, meander and saunder through some of the most fantastic natural beauty available to humankind while it is still natural and beautiful. I want to spend time in the ocean I live so close to now, perhaps take up surfing or windsurfing or diving. I want to put more energy into my relationships with others. I want to open myself to possibilities, to not define myself by my job or my formal education. I want to struggle in new and exciting way such that I may progress in new and exciting ways. This involves certain risks, certain deviations from the roadmap I’ve supposedly internalized. This may upset certain sensibilities or value systems in certain people, but it’s not their life I’m living. This is Thoreau finally succeeding. This is the practice of freedom. For what it’s worth, I’m going to let the application deadline for graduate school come and go, opt out of the expected and known, risk a little, and give it my all to try to not let the dust settle on my life too much.