The graduation question

The GRE is over and done with. That's a relief. Nonetheless, this week has totally not been the free-time-filled paradise I had hoped for! Well, that's OK. I get a little antsy when I don't have anything to do - two days off on a weekend and I'm more than ready to get back to work.

I was thinking about hobbies, and things I like to do. When I was 18 and just about to graduate from high school, a woman at my church sat down next to me and said, if you could have any job in the world, what would it be? It struck me as though she thought that if someone had asked her the very same question when she was my age, her life might have gone in an entirely different direction.

I remember saying to her that I wanted to be a writer one day, even write a novel.

Now up until that point, I had had this idea that writing was something some people do as an end in itself. You have a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, and a writer. The writer is the only one who does the book writing, the creating, the recording.

But in the few years that have passed since then, I have come to the impression that writing is more of a mode of transportation of thoughts, and no longer a stationary object. What a writer really is is a thinker. It's just a person with an idea.

So then I thought to myself, why would I choose to take that as my job title? Because it sounds to me as though everyone, in that sense, is a writer. Just because I enjoy it, doesn't mean I need to be paid for it. It certainly doesn't mean I need to be a Writer to write; I can just as easily be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher who just happens to communicate through writing. Now I see what the original question might have really been - in one sense, the question might have served as a starting point for making a passion into a career. In another sense, the question draws awareness to those passions within ourselves that we hold regardless of a career.