Here's an excerpt from a sermon by Frederick Buechner which has helped motivated me. It's from his collection 'Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons' and it's entitled The Calling of Voices:
"Like "duty," "law," and "religion," the word "vocation" has a dull ring to it, but in terms of what it means, it is really not dull at all. Vocare, "to call," of course, and our vocation is our calling. It is the work that we are called to in this world, the thing that we are summoned to spend our lives doing. We can speak of ourselves as choosing our vocations, but perhaps it is at least as accurate to speak of our vocations choosing us, of a call's being given and lives our hearing, or not hearing it. And maybe that is the place to start: the business of listening and hearing. Our lives are full of all sorts of voices calling us in all sorts of directions. Some of them are voices from inside and some of them are voices from outside. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives are. Which do we listen to? What kind of voice do we listen for?
There is a sad and dangerous little game we play when we get to be a certain age. It is a form of solitaire. We get out our class yearbook, look at the pictures of the classmates we knew best, and recall the days when we first knew them in school, all those years ago. We think about all the exciting, crazy, wonderfully characteristic things they used to be interested in and about the kind of dreams we had about what we were going to do when we graduated and about the kind of dreams that maybe we had for some of them. Then we think about what those classmates actually did with their lives, what we are doing with them now ten or twenty years later. I make no claim that the game is always sad or that when it seems to be sad our judgment is always right, but once or twice when I have played it myself, sadness has been a large part of what I have felt. Because in my class, at the school I went to, as in any class at any school, there were students who had a real flair, a real talent, for something. Maybe it was for writing or acting or sports. Maybe it was an interest and a joy in working with people towards some common goal, a sense of responsibility for people who in some way had less than they had or were less. Sometimes it was just their capacity for being so alive that made you more alive to be with them. Yet now, a good many years later, I have the feeling that more than just a few of them are spending their lives at work in which none of these gifts is being used, at work they seem to be working at with neither much pleasure nor any sense of accomplishment. This is the sadness of the game, and the danger of it is that maybe we find that in some measure we are among them or that we are too blind to see that we are.
When you are young, I think, your hearing is in some ways better than it is ever going to be again. You hear better than most people the voices that call to you out of your own life to give yourself to this work or that work. When you are young, before you accumulate responsibilities, you are freer than most people to choose among all the voices and to answer the one that speaks most powerfully to who you are and to what you really want to do with your life. But the danger is that there are so many voices and they all in their ways sound so promising. The danger is that you will not listen to the voice that speaks to you through the seagull mounting the gray wind, say, or the vision i nthe temple, that you do not listen to the voice inside you or to the voice that speaks from outside but specifically to you out of the specific events of your life, but that instead you listen to the great blaring, boring, banal voice of our mass culture, which threatens to deafen us all by blasting forth that the only thing that really matters about your work is how much it will get you in the way of salary and status, and that if it is gladness you are after, you can save that for weekends.
The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in a life's work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realizing someday that they have spent the only years that they are ever going to get in this world doing something that could not matter less to themselves or anyone else. This does not mean, of course, people who are doing work that from the outside looks unglamorous and humdru, because obviously such work as that may be a crucial form of service and deeply creative. But it means people who are doing work that seems simply irrelevent not only to the great human needs and issues of our time but also to their own need to grow and develop as humans.
.... In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad. If we keep our eyes and ears open, our hearts open, we will find the place surely. The phone will ring and we will jump not so much out of our skin as into our skin. If we keep our lives open, the right place will find us."
So I know it's a long read, and education does not necessarly mean your dream job, but the harsh reality I've been confronted with (even at my young age), as someone who dropped out at age 16 and has been just a through and through f^(k up, is that college not only opens hundreds of doors previously closed to you, but I think that being grouped with people of a similiar age and situation allows you to dream more fully about what you want to do.
It's easy to settle. We all know this to be true. For those of us who haven't had many options or known something different it is easier for us to stick with what we know, to not try our hardest and risk failing for something we've never had. It's just you're going to have a hell of a hard time finding someone's who's settled happy with their position in life. Someone posted here "If you're happy working fast food, and there are people who are" and I have to seriously question his or her sanity. No one is happy working fast food or any retail/restaurant job, even down to the managment. That is as true of a fact you'll ever find.
So that's why education has suddenly become important to me. I'm sick of settling for sh!t and just getting by. I want to do something that motivates and excites me -- and who knows what the hell that is, but I'm going to at least try to find out -- and I think the only way I'll be able to discover what that is, and to land a job in whatever field/area, is through getting an education.
Anyways... my bad for going on and on. This is just something I've been thinking about for awhile.
