For years, I worked at a large firm that had little or nothing to do with what I had studied for, what really called to me. But life was complicated enough, I thought, and the work was steady.
Until one day it wasn't. I was out on the street (OK, I still had my apartment) with the crumbling plaster of a collapsed firm in my hair, and five cardboard boxes of mostly personal effects that I had allowed to accumulate as though that office were my home.
Some time later, still looking for what I would do next, I had sat down in the Bethlehem chapel of the National Cathedral on a glorious fall day. Some distance outside, the Glastonbury thorn was in full bloom, which is normally said to occur on Easter and Christmas. If one wants to be pedantic, there are scholars who say the Nativity took place actually at that time of year, and the holy day was shifted to December when July and August were reshuffled to the middle of the year. While I respectfully take issue with Camus's assertion that "autumn is a second spring, every leaf a flower" -- the one time, in the natural world and in our lives, surely echoes but is not the same as the other -- I chose to take it as confirmation that in autumn you can begin again. And what I stopped refusing to realize, as I sat there in the first part of the Cathedral to have been built, was that I would be discontent if I did not focus in some part of my life, even if not as a career vocation, on the things of the spirit that animate the world.
Until one day it wasn't. I was out on the street (OK, I still had my apartment) with the crumbling plaster of a collapsed firm in my hair, and five cardboard boxes of mostly personal effects that I had allowed to accumulate as though that office were my home.
Some time later, still looking for what I would do next, I had sat down in the Bethlehem chapel of the National Cathedral on a glorious fall day. Some distance outside, the Glastonbury thorn was in full bloom, which is normally said to occur on Easter and Christmas. If one wants to be pedantic, there are scholars who say the Nativity took place actually at that time of year, and the holy day was shifted to December when July and August were reshuffled to the middle of the year. While I respectfully take issue with Camus's assertion that "autumn is a second spring, every leaf a flower" -- the one time, in the natural world and in our lives, surely echoes but is not the same as the other -- I chose to take it as confirmation that in autumn you can begin again. And what I stopped refusing to realize, as I sat there in the first part of the Cathedral to have been built, was that I would be discontent if I did not focus in some part of my life, even if not as a career vocation, on the things of the spirit that animate the world.