Tired of Auditioning

Today I rediscovered the perfection that is Norah Jones’s first album during a rainstorm. It’s March rain – not freezing or blowing, but dripping slowly down the glass, cool enough to leave the windows open. Though it seems impossible after so much barrenness, every day this week the green puckers of buds curl slightly more open on the trees in the courtyard.

If only my own thoughts were budding with as much patient inevitability as the trees! Honestly, I had some pretty grand ambitions about all the writing and blogging I was going to do with 5 uninterrupted days of down time. Um, yeah, so, not so much.

It astonished me how much effort it took to get my mind to slow down these past few days. As my earlier posts suggest, February was a whirlwind, full of weighty tasks and weighty thoughts. I think it’s taken four days of simple mental emptiness (and The Office season 2 – ah, PBJ - on DVD) to even begin to think clearly and release the weight of the past six weeks. Basically, you can’t just shed the weight all at once.

This annoys me. I’m impatient. I don’t think I have time to let the ground lay fallow.

Nouwen tells me that “a seed only flourishes by staying in the ground in which it is sown. When you keep digging the seed up to check whether it is growing, it will never bear fruit…. This growth takes place even when you do not feel it.”

Am I growing? What will the next season be like? Is this winter almost done? – These are the weighty questions that the past month has held. Essentially, I feel like it’s been a month of auditioning. Of preparing a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” I had two job applications due, for very different types of work, which required major tweaking of the CV and much wrangling of the cover letters in hopes that I might spin these last three years of unpaid “experience” into something that will pay the bills. It’s so psychically taxing to write cover letters, I have to say. Essentially, I feel like I have to get myself emotionally to a place where I totally believe I am perfect for the position, that they would be fools not to, at the very least, interview me. I have to create the imaginary life that would accompany that particular job. Then I can sit down and actually write something persuasive, that conveys my enthusiasm for whatever the position might be.

And then I have to do it again. For a different job, in a different city, with different qualifications!

I’ve begun to feel like sending out job applications is not unlike going on a blind date. There’s a lot of preparation beforehand. You try to find out as much as you can about the particular person/job, then you spin your interests/credentials in the way that will be most enticing for them to call you again (i.e., interview you). I remember one date I went on with an architect (sweet, boring) in which I managed to drudge up pretty much everything I knew about architectural styles, and talked convincingly the whole night about what is, at best, a pretty small circle of knowledge and interest on my part. Does this make me manipulative? Or just a decently accommodating conversationalist?

All I know is that, for me, it’s pretty much the same skill set required for dating and for job applications. And unfortunately, that means that it comes with all the same potential for big-time disappointment. For the inevitable hopes-getting-dashed bit.

I know this sounds insecure. And, truthfully, I feel insecure about the future at the moment. It feels heavy. Not the least of which is because of websites like this one, which detail the horrors of the higher-education world presently, with its system of adjuncting and marginal pay (like, qualifying-for-government-cheese marginal) for professors (particularly in the humanities, particularly in composition, and particularly for women). Righteous anger starts to well up in my chest reading about these kinds of things. Then it flares out, and I become convinced that the only logical thing to do is to pitch my career path entirely and happily go back to working at the bookshop I loved so much during grad school. Become happily downwardly mobile.

Weighty thoughts.

And then there was the “auditioning” required of our English department last week. A fancy panel of experts from universities around Europe came to examine our program, conduct interviews, and skim through piles of reports we’d all been putting together for over a year. All that was at stake was, oh you know, the future of the institution and its ability to offer accredited degrees.

Weighty.

There’s the daily auditioning for friendship, for community, for workplace and social approval. Who will I hang out with this weekend? Why hasn’t my phone rung in days?

It’s these kinds of thoughts that make me wonder if anything is growing in me, other than yawning self-pity and anxiety. I’m anxious to dig up the seeds that the years here have planted and see if they’re going to bloom into something good, or something rotten. Impatient.

I know that I need to be more like the farmer described in Wendell Berry’s amazing “Mad Farmer” poems, one who says:

“Don’t worry and fret about the crops.
After you have done all
You can for them,
let them stand in the weather on their own.

If the crop of any one year was all,
a man would have to cut his
Throat every time it hailed.

But the real products of any year’s work
are the farmer’s mind
And the cropland itself.”

In all of these insecurities and anxieties and flyings back-and-forth across continents, and striving toward excellent work, and striving toward approval and worth, I know that the real cropland is heart-land. And even if this week it’s felt fallow and empty, even if this year it’s felt fallow and empty, I can still rely on the fact that something is growing, is planted deep. I don’t know what the next whole year holds. I want things to be simpler. I really just want to be as content as the roses that Mary Oliver describes saying: ”the[ir] answer was simply to rise/ In joyfulness, all their days.”

I want that to be enough for me. I believe in a God who provides for and guides us, who eagerly accepts whatever we offer to Him, big or small. I really want my joy-fully-lived life to be enough, and to let go of striving and anxiety. I realize so deeply that all these weighty thoughts, this self-doubt reigning in my head, is a result of having lost perspective and a correct sense of God’s faithfulness. Moreover, it’s a forgetting of what is eternal. Simone Weil, in her essay “The Mysticism of Work” suggests that “slavery is work without any light from eternity, without poetry, without religion. May eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary.”

Eternal light. Like sunshine, this heart-land needs it desperately.