Ideal Idea

This is significant for me: I figured out something I'd like to do for a living. That's the first step, I'm told, toward self-actualization or fulfillment or achieving the accomplishments one strives to maintain
- something like that.

It wasn't easy, in my case at least, and if it's easy for other people they can go sit on a tack. For all I care.

I'd like to drive around, meeting people and hearing their stories about their lives and how they make sense of it all, then write my interviews and reflections. Yep. That's what I want to do.

There are other things I might like, of course, but for years and years it's been hard to imagine *anything* as appealing as that, and I've sort of drifted, hoping to drift past something good so I could tilt my rudder in that direction. I like to imagine myself as having a rudder.

It involves several of my likes and a decent number of my strengths - I like hearing people's stories and I'm consistently curious enough to sit through them. I like writing, synthesizing my thoughts in a way that makes them seem less random, and I like being out in the middle of the day. When I'm driving on a highway at two in the afternoon, I feel free. I understand this could wear off after a while, as it undoubtedly does for truckers and such, but to me, now, no matter which direction I'm driving, I'm escaping. It's stolen time, and we all know nothing is as gratifying to enjoy as the spoils of rightful theft.

My plan, then - somebody said once, and I heard him or her, that if you really want to do something, really , really, you'll do it for free. That's the indisputable indication of passion and commitment, and karmically speaking it never ends badly. So rather than wait around for someone to ask me to compile the life views and biographies of ordinary folk, or offer me grand sums of grant money to do it, I'm just gonna do it. (In my extra time, that is, when I'm not earning a living otherwise.)

Someone's bound to let me interview them for no reason, then someone else, and someone else, and so forth. They get their story told, and I get to tell a story. And I learn things, absorb wisdom - that sort of thing. That's the other thing I really like.

So steal my idea if you may; I don't care all that much. (Some, yes, but not too much.) This is what I'm doing, whether anybody wants me to or not. It's what I want and it's what I'm good at. It's where I'm pointing my rudder.