After a whole lot of hard work, eventually you discover that you are sitting in your apartment (or in a café, or in your parents’ house) with your degree in your hand and nothing on your schedule except to find something to do with the rest of your life. Many people get to skip this step, and either turn a previous internship into a job, or turn a part-time job into a full-time job, etc., etc. They get to skip this step: the free schedule, the time to think about what you just did and what you are going to do, the time of peace…
So peaceful, in fact, that you realize you are finished, and you still feel like you do not know what’s going on [in your field] and you definitely have no idea what you are supposed to do with the next forty years of your life. They always say- the more you know the more you realize you have to learn.
Meanwhile, I am in a café, and there is a rooster sitting just outside the window.
Really, there is.
I am in a café that is located in a park, and not just any park- a park plus zoo. Anytime I want, I can look away from my laptop and tall glass of verse munt thee (fresh mint tea) and look at a pasture filled with chickens, roosters, and white-tailed deer. The deer do seem a bit fat, locked up in this pen. But this one lone rooster- What is it doing? As far I have seen, poultry on the whole, fly very poorly… But this one somehow escaped.
Now that it has left everything it has ever known behind, and it is hopping from table to table, I wonder whether it has found all that it hoped to find. Is this what we’re supposed to do? Keep moving? Trying out new lives until we find one that fits? Or are we reading far too much into it after all? Should we just sit and wait? And it will eventually come. Will we eventually fit in? I have heard that Not all those who wander are lost. But, I hope that at least some are. Makes me feel a bit more optimistic.
Out in the pasture, I can now see two peacocks. They certainly seem out-of-place, and they seem quite cold, come to think of it. I wonder why they are there… for animal diversity? Or because everything is so jumbled that there really isn’t a natural habitat for anything anymore?
& do I want to be more like the rooster or the peacock? Keep truckin’ and keep looking? Or just settle in where I’m at?
The herd of deer is returning to the center of the pasture again. I suppose I had better get back to my search as well. One thing is for sure, I will definitely order this verse munt thee again.
