All a Man Can Do by Tom Rush

"All a Man Can Do" by Tom Rush starts off with a young man saying goodbye to his parents, young and fresh, embarking on his life. In the end,

It doesn’t seem so long ago, I hitched down to New Mexico
I kissed my mama, I saw my father’s stone
Friends are gone or out or touch, but nothing seems to change that
much
The desert’s hot the sky’s still blue, I’m getting by still making
due
Take your chances take your shot, cause 50/50’s all you got
Make each day the best you can, that’s a line I understand
Live each moment like your last, cause life goes by you so damn fast
Make a promise and keep it true, cause that is all a man can do

What this makes me think of is that we grow older, we all experience hardships and loss. The unwise feel sorry for themselves and feel injustices have been done to them. The wise recognize that it's part of the cycles of life, and are able to maintain their sense of wholeness and keep on going through life, keep on seeing the beauty in life.

What I like about volunteering at Clearwater

People think I volunteer at Clearwater because it's a folk festival. That's what drew me to it, and an essential part of what it is, that's only a part of it. I'd rather be there as a volunteer, doing work but missing some of the music, than as an audience member attending every performance. One of the things that I like best is being part of the community. I don't necessarily talk to individual people much, but I like being in an environment where I feel like I'm part of the dominant culture. In my regular life, people think the food I eat is weird, they've never heard of the musicians I like, and they think my values are unusual.

Another aspect that I like is the outdoor environment. I like the scenic views and the rugged living. I like pitching a tent. I like being able to weather the rain by wearing a raincoat and rain pants.

What I want to do with my life, Clearwater edition

When I go somewhere -- to the Clearwater festival or to visit my family -- I feel like I know who I am and what's important to me. When I return to my normal life, it is with the sense that soon it will all slip away -- I'll get caught up in my life again, in caring about the wrong things and not knowing who I am.

Here is what attending this year's Clearwater festival told me:

• It's important to me to be in a community where people strive to treat everyone well. If you have a goal of doing good in the world, but you don't treat your own people right, you've lost it. In every community, there will be some discord, but it makes a difference whether or not people have a sense that they are all committed to treating each other as community members.
• I like doing physical work and working with people. Perhaps neither is an area where I would be an expert, but I like doing the work, the nonskilled work that gets assigned to volunteers.
• I like being useful -- having demands placed on me and being able to rise to the occasion.
  
• I like being outside.
• I like not having to cook, wash dishes, drive, clean house, or manage finances.
  

Hooray for summer

I love summer because after work it is both light enough and warm enough to go outside. And on weekends, I can go sit by the river. And in summer I'm less sick.

Vignettes from What Should I Do With My Life book

I have been reading What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson. It is a series of stories of different people's career paths, people whose paths were not a straight line. It's the kind of book that is good to read just a little at a time, because each story has its own pearl of wisdom, and you need time to digest each one. I just read a few from the beginning of the third section. (There are 8 sections total.) The section starts off with Bronson telling about a particular time in his life. For the past 5 years, he had been working toward an MFA and trying to get his short stories published. One day, he wrote a story that was very different from the stories he usually wrote. It was not about the things serious writers were supposed to write about, but was written from his experience. For years, writing had been laborious. This story flowed quickly from him and was fun to write. He decided he wanted to make it into a novel. Everyone whose opinion he respected told him that this was not the right direction, that his other stories were better. However, it was what he wanted to do, and he pursued it. He got a new agent, finished writing the novel much sooner than he expected, and got it published. It became an international bestseller.

But does it always happen that way? What if the people who gave him advice had been right? Isn't it the case that sometimes the thing that you want to do is not something that anyone else will be interested in paying for?

And is there anything that I love doing the way he loved that kind of writing?

Of the question that is the title of the book, he writes, "Asking the question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering the question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone you're not."

There's also the story of a young man named Anthony. When he graduated from college, he thought he'd like to be a teacher, but he had a contact in the British Foreign Office, and he chose to take the more prestigious job there, thinking he could always do teaching later. When he was 30, he got sick. Of his illness, Bronson wrote, "His doctor diagnosed him with the Epstein-Barr virus....not a virus that wins the patient much sympathy. It stays dormant in the blood forever, occasionally reactivating in times of stress." This part of course interested me, because it's the same thing that I may have.

Anthony's college friend and his father had both died, so he had experienced the fact that lives can end unexpectedly. While he was sick, the question that he asked himself was, "If I were to make an early exit from this world, what will I feel worst about not getting done?" For him, the answer was to go home to Britain and become a teacher at a school attended by children from low income families. What would my answer be? The first thing would be spending more time with my family. Other things would be compiling the family history information I have, meeting some of the distant relatives whom I don't know (mainly the descendents of Philip Bailey), visiting the places my ancestors lived in Maine, and spending more time outside.

Hope

On the way to and from work, I walk past the hydrangeas. At this time of year, the green leaves are growing, but there are no flowers. As I see how the leaves have been growing, it makes me happy, because I know flowers on the way. Sometimes the anticipation of something brings happiness as much as the thing itself.

Parker Palmer interview

In an interview with Chel Avery, Parker Palmer says, "no matter what punishments come down on you for living out your own identity and integrity, and punishments do come, you have to understand eventually that no punishment could be worse than the punishment you lay on yourself by conspiring in your own diminishment." He also describes Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet as saying, "Keep asking your questions but don't expect to get answers to them. Because the questions are too big. Live those questions. The point is to live everything, and one distant day without even knowing it, you may find that you've lived your way into an answer."