The one-month mark

April 29, 2009

Tomorrow marks one month away from the work world. I’m disappointed that I’ve spent four golden weeks of semi-leisure being a Fretful Jones. I disregarded, or couldn’t allow myself, to take the advice of my children and party my butt off during this month. I enjoyed a few days to the hilt, but overall it’s been a lackadaisical month. Someday, I will realize what I was meant to learn from this episode in my life. For now, it pretty much remains a mystery.

I’m keeping busy getting ready for school, cruising the college’s Web site, and learning to use the online database, my student e-mail and the Blackboard learning platform. I’m trying to read some short stories to get in the groove for extensive reading. I can’t believe I’m yearning for the start of classes so I can put my mind to the test.

There are times when I feel pretty proud of myself for going back to school to learn new skills. It should be an exciting time. The Blessed Wife keeps telling me that.

It’s that fear of the unknown that keeps gnawing at my psyche. It’s so irrational, when you think about it.

My 22-year-old daughter is two-thirds of her way through her master’s in education program, working three part-time jobs, taking out loans to finish her coursework this summer, is starting to apply for jobs not knowing if and where she’ll get one, is less than four months away from getting married and possibly moving hundreds of miles away from her current home. I don’t hear her complaining about not being able to sleep or experiencing monkey mind. She does complain about not having enough money, though.

That makes me think back to my days at Syracuse where I was married with a small child, worked a part-time job answering telephones, went to school full-time and didn't know if I would have a job after graduation. We had no money. I slept pretty well in those days and thoroughly enjoyed myself. And you know what? Things worked out in the end. Just before graduation, I scored a job at the Hornell Evening Tribune. Prayers answered.

As we get old, we get set in our ways. We start to fear change. Heck, we’re changing TV services tomorrow from cable to satellite dish and that seems like a daunting prospect. I’ll have to learn new channels to find my science programs! Why is life so hard? (I’m joking, of course.)

Another subject I have to tackle at some point: Why we identify so much with what we do. The ego must be subdued. We are not our occupations. We are something more than that – spiritual beings having a human experience. We are what we give to the world.