Life is a-maze-ing

I am thinking of stopping my environmental work in a year, when Vic maybe retires once and for all. But what will I do instead? Years ago I thought that after I was done with policy and grant writing I would write for fun and profit and I began doodling around and taking workshops but I have run into plenty of dead ends on that front. (“Oh, you are a writer? What have you written?” Well I have this book that nobody wants and like everybody else I write a blog. . . .)

There have been many other apparent dead ends in my work life and I don’t want to write about all of them. But here is the thing. I keep expecting one thing to lead to another and it seldom does—not in the way I expect and hope, not even when I apply myself and exercise uncharacteristic determination. And this occasionally throws me into a panic, like it did last night as I was thinking that I want to stop what I am doing but I am not ready for outright retirement. I woke up with this dream:

I was a struggling academic. I needed to choose a research project and write a grant proposal to support it. I was weighing several options. I didn’t want to do any of them, nor did I think any of them had a good chance of working out. But the project that presented itself most insistently was to study the giant vortex of garbage growing in the Pacific Ocean.

I recognize the different levels of this dream. Some of it is pretty literal: I write grant proposals, and there is indeed a garbage gyre in the Pacific. And then, metaphorically, environmental work is a study in the endless and, despite our efforts, growing collection of human garbage on Planet Earth. My environmental circles (that image again) are dominated by academic and policy-type thinking, at which I am pretty good but I don’t really feel at home in it. I struggle. I am growing tired of doing any of it. And yet the projects, the needs, keep presenting themselves.

Stepping out of this work would feel like an escape from the swirl but into what? The vast ocean of possibility that is life, with no clear direction.

Perhaps life is more like a maze than a journey. We go in one end, wander around, explore the rich possibilities and intriguing dead ends, and come out the other end, which may be very near where we entered. Do not panic, like the family who recently got lost in a corn maze and had to call 911 although they were only 25 feet from the exit.

Above all, do not be sucked in by the swirl of garbage. Study it, or escape from it for awhile and see where the currents of the Universe bear you.