Life Goals

In a junior high Family and Consumer Science class, we were each given a piece of paper with questions dealing with what we would like to do when we grew up. We were supposed to think about what we saw ourselves doing in the future.

I sat there and sat there, and I couldn't see myself doing anything. Well, other than watering the flowers outside of my cottage as I walked around in sandals and a sundress. That's what I saw in my head. So I wrote that down. I don't remember the teacher's comments when she saw that my life goal was to own an English-style cottage with sloping roofs and ivy up the side and to water my plants and sit and read in the sunshine. Doctor? Teacher? No, it didn't llamarme la atención.

Currently I am not doing that. I'm pursuing a graduate degree and working as a research assistant. And often I feel a little lost, like I'm a little minnow trying to swim upstream with a bunch of muscled salmon. That sounds a lot lost. Okay, maybe like a little kid trying to use the big words and use the same gestures as the big kids, trying to fake my way through until hopefully I actually do start to get it, do understand, can make my own sociological analyses and feel confident about them. Right now I think I'm just pretending.

Recently I took a personality test through the Enneagram Institute, and I turned out a 9, a peacemaker. Several of the graduate students I've talked to are 4s and 5s - Individualists and Investigators. I haven't met anyone else who identifies as a Peacemaker; easy-going, receptive, complacent. These make me wonder if maybe I am lost; maybe my personality doesn't prepare me to be a world-class sociological researcher.

Then why am I here?

When I took my first sociology class as an undergraduate student, it opened my eyes. I learned so much. I started thinking about my assumptions and prejudices. It changed me. I think it made me a better person. I continued with sociology, planning on doing social work. After an internship where I realized that it was mostly paperwork and a lot of redtape and dealing with unhappy children and unhappy parents, I thought maybe I could try something else. A lot of my professors, and friends, had been mentioning graduate school for a while. I started to take them seriously. I'm smart. I'm doing well as an undergraduate. Maybe I could be a professor and help students view the world in a different way as I had been helped. I read Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and felt excited by his encouragement in the value and validity of Christians working in higher education. I wanted to be part of that.

So here I am, halfway through my first semester. I have research projects that I keep sludging along with. I have three papers staring at me like a mountain in the Black Hills and I have my little MacBook of a pickaxe as I try to create Crazy Horse. But I'm also working as a teacher's assistant in an introductory sociology class, and I like that a lot. I was able to lecture on a couple of topics. I've had one-on-one interactions with some of the students, explaining on a personal level the nuances of a particular sociological concept. I like that.

We'll see where I end up. For the time being I will continue chiseling away at my future publishable papers, thinking about how my life experiences and my individual personality meet up.

Counting heartbeats.

Sometimes I am sitting reading an article or a book, and I am sitting so still that I can see my hair vibrate from my heartbeat. So I slowly move one hand to check my pulse, and sure enough - the vibrations are from my heartbeat. So I sit even stiller and try to notice other vibrations. Maybe my scarf will shake, maybe I can feel the pulse in my hands or legs or hear it in my ears. I become aware of my breathing. I think "I need to exercise more."

I like being aware of my heart as it just keeps pumping pumping pumping. It's steady and faithful. My fingertips are pink and my toes aren't cold. When we studied the circulatory system in biology I would imagine my arteries breaking off into smaller and smaller vessels, ending in tiny capillaries so small that only one red blood cell could pass through at a time. I would close my eyes and feel my heart beat and think about being alive and how my body takes care of me; my heart pumping without me ever asking it to; my lungs working with air pressure to move oxygen in and out of my body.

So sometimes I get really distracted when I'm reading articles or books for class. It's more fun to count my heartbeats.

an exercise in humility

I am currently applying for graduate programs in sociology. Actually, I'm about finished, with only two due dates ahead of me and my active roles all completed. I am applying to nine Ph.D. sociology programs and have already received notice that I have been accepted into one program (as I haven't heard from any others, that makes it 1 for 1, I guess).

When I came down here to Mexico it was for several reasons, but one was that I wanted to practice trusting God, if that makes sense. I wanted to leave my comfortable and under-control life and let God lead me with cultural struggles, raising money, unsureness about the future. Looking back on my journal through the past year I can see that I have grown in how I trust God, but I still don't trust him completely, as these applications have shown. I was a little bundle of intrusive worries - worries that would subside as I focused on my work or my friends, but which surfaced with pinches of awareness in how I still had to finish this and send that off and oh no! I don't think I changed that information before I attached it to the email!

Currently, as I have finished my part, these worries surface when the online status updater lacks my GRE scores or my transcript. What in tarnation? That should have been there since October. I have to stop and tell God again that I want him to be in control. I place this application in his hands. There's not much I can do, but I want to practice trusting.

I also have to practice humility. I didn't start off needing to, as I didn't have much confidence in being accepted (I thought I had weak research experience.) There was a huge difference once I heard from the first school, though. It began with a grateful acknowledgement that now I have an open door to receive a Ph.D. But before long I was thinking "ah, this personal statement is fine. It's already gotten me into grad school," and expecting to hear positively from all of my other schools as well. Is there such a thing as gluttony of schools? I can only attend one at a time, but I want to be accepted into all of them.

Oddly, I think often of the people with whom I attended high school, thinking how I will increase in their estimation. People for whose opinion I have cared little, but over whom I still desire superiority. Odd the workings of our human nature, hm?

Isaiah 26: 12 - Lord you establish peace for us. All that we have accomplished, you have done for us.




I shall also have to be careful in my social life, for, as Jane Austen says "A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can." (Northanger Abbey)