It has been another good, long Wednesday. They often are–good and long. I am tired in part because I spend a few hours each Wednesday volunteering at the Berkeley Food Pantry. I’ve written about this many times in the months since I started working there nearly a year ago. It has been a mainstay in my life providing me with meaningful connections with the community, work with a team of terrific people, and a deep sense of giving something of myself in ways I don’t do anyplace else in my life at the moment. I am grateful for stepped outside of my normal shyness to show up at the pantry that first day in mid June last year. It’s been a blessing ever since.
Tonight I find myself once again deep in thought about my “what’s next.” I have spent many months trying to figure out what I want to be doing next in terms of my vocation and where I want to be doing it. I have applied for a number of positions that involve similar work in the same field I’ve worked in for over 25 years. I have had a number of phone interviews and a few in-person ones, none of which resulted in my employment. It’s been suggested to me by a number of people that the Universe is perhaps trying to send me a message that I need to be doing something different, and I have been willing to acknowledge that perhaps that’s true. Unfortunately, I have not really yet landed on what that something different looks like. This has made it a bit tricky to figure out how to proceed. How does one apply for something when one doesn’t know what that something is?
I have written about this theme in past blogs (search “right livelihood” and you’ll probably find some of them), and I’m too tired to write about it tonight. What I will say is that I’m doing my best to practice patience in learnign to sit with the not knowing. The poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote,
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”I am not keen to wait until “some distant day” for the answers, but I am willing to be patient and figure out how to live while living the questions. And so tonight I am grateful for the patience that periodically allows me to calm my breathing, slow myself down and take in what is going on around me in the present moment rather than fretting about the uncertainties of the future. Some days it works a little better than others, but that is where the patience comes in .
I still have a lot to say, gifts and talents to offer the world, and a genuine desire and willingness to be of service. I look forward to finding the opportunity–living my way into the answers–at some point soon. I have no particular destination in mind at the moment; my goal for now is to enjoy the journey. I’ll send postcards!
