eureka

Wow. I'm either having a stroke or a major epiphany, and I think it's the latter, not the former. I can't quite believe that I am able to type the following with considerable conviction:

I just figured out what I'm supposed to be doing.

Those of you who have had the misfortune of sitting around listening to me complain about my job, my ambitions, my fears for the future, my chronic boredom and dissatisfaction, or my crazy, cockamamie ideas about this or that will recognize that being able to type that sentence is a huge thing for me. Huge. Scary. Amazing. Wow.

I don't even want to type up what it is. It's just too good still. It's still sending out tendrils of "Holy Crap, YES!" into my brain. Maybe it will be unsurprising to you. Maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, you've heard me talking about doing this before (but in a different context), years ago. Maybe it will look like a pipe dream as soon as I post it to my blog, so I'm keeping it for now. I'll let it free when I understand it and can see how I get there. I will get there, though.

I can tell you how it occurred to me. I got an email from my alma mater this morning saying that the organic farm there got torched. That got me thinking about the Sustainable Agriculture program there. That got me thinking about all of the interests I have that are currently hobbies or mental playthings, but that could be brought together into a course of study, a thesis, and that doing so actually has potential for bringing some of these ideas to life. It then occurred to me how Evergreen is probably the only academic setting in the area where I might be able to pull it off.

OK, so now I feel better about typing that I'm going to look into getting into their Master of Environmental Studies program.

This is where those few of you who knew me in High School start to laugh. That is, of course, the plan I left home with 17 years ago, the plan I got distracted from, the plan I honestly didn't understand at the time. At all. So what's different now?

The biggest thing is the real world experience I have. I think about things now in terms of their practical applications, in terms of workflows, relationships, motivations, and dependencies. Back then, I just thought about what seemed like a cool thing to do. I had no focus. I didn't understand any of my friendships, or relationships with professors, or even relationships between disciplines and ideas.

Another thing? The world is a completely different place. Global warming, alternative energy, the widespread availability information through the internet, all these things came into prominence is society after I had already abandoned Environmental Studies.

Another big thing is that I no longer have any illusions about how useful knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or isolated academic pursuits, are in the lives of real people. I'm ready to work. I'm ready to work on something truly Great, and this is the way I get to do that. From where I'm sitting now, it looks like what I want to accomplish could change the world. Maybe that sounds like the old megalomania coming back, but is it really so incredible? Every world-changing idea started with a real person. I try not to get caught up in thinking about predestination, but if there is still some vestige of religion in me, it's there. If I'm meant to do something now, this is it. If all I accomplish is that I change my life, well, that's OK too.

It's going to be hard to get into grad school, to pay for it, and to figure out a way to actually do the work without completely disrupting my family. It's going to be hard to have people hear what I'm thinking about and start poking holes in it. It's going to be hard to wait until I can make even the first pieces of this first step fall into place, and to maintain my vision over the span of time necessary to get it done. I'm ready, though. If there was ever a time to start, this is it.