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Dear ,
Thank you for your response to my last Journal entry. I think of myself as a person who is more focused on the journey than the end goal. Sure, I still need to have goals for myself, but it is the road on which I am travelling right now that I want to make the most of. I do not want to have my life be something off in the distance that I will someday reach. Such a let-down it would be when I reached it only to find that the days of my 'life' are much the same as the days that led up to it! For this reason, I cannot view my Master and doctorate as 'hoops to jump through' to get to my 'dream job'. There are neither hoops, nor such a job waiting for me down that imaginary line we call the future. Indeed, seeing such hoops and jobs creates the future as a line. Once the hoops are cleared and the job achieved, the line becomes forks with more decisions and freedom to make choices. This is not the perception of the future that I have.
For me, I am doing my degrees not so much because they are getting me to someplace I want to be, but because I am someplace I want to be right now. What the future will hold I am not sure, and I am comfortable with that uncertainty. If I do not get onto the doctorate, I will not consider this year spent in vain. I have learned a great deal this year that I look forward to applying whatever step I take next.
My lack of a beeline in my life is clearly evident through the many cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural moves I have made through the years. We all want goals in life that we seek to achieve. The goals that I have in my life are of varying lengths, and the ones pertaining to jobs/careers I think most likely do not span very long. By having them such, I keep myself flexible to changes in my environment and my interests. I do not ask myself if I could see myself doing this or that for the rest of my life, because chances are that I wouldn't anyway. Rather than stymieing my decision-making by getting caught up in the uncertainty of my future (or worse, making a decision based on the belief that the future is certain), I accept the temporal nature of my decisions and realise that they will have to be revisited again.
This focus on the present, as you saw in my Journal, does have its faults. If I cannot see why I am here right now (not what I am working towards, but what I am working on) then I have a tendency to get stuck. For my economics of organisation course (and parts of others) it is true that the content does not greatly interest me. I cannot resort, though, to the argument that I must do it to get to where I want to be. Rather, in those cases I look instead for some other aspect of the course that I can find interesting. In economics, what I am focusing my attention on now is how so many social science researchers seem to view every human interaction entirely in economic terms, sidelining or ignoring the cultural, social, and environmental aspects of those interactions. One could say that viewing the course thus actually does further me along my path towards my doctoral research and beyond, and I won't argue that it most likely does, but that view takes the emphasis off of the present and places it on the hopes and uncertainty of the future.
I place the centre of my life in what I believe and what I know. My beliefs come from those things which I take for certain but cannot be proved in any way, such as the love of my family and the existence of God. What I know is merely the perceptions that I am able to have of the world around me. Am I willing to say that wood is really metal or air doesn't actually exist? Sure, but those phrases are meaningless to me because I could just as easily assert the opposite. I always refer at this point to the movie The Matrix. Is it possible that the world we live in may only be a construct on a computer, and we have no way of telling? Why not? Does it matter?
I cannot know everything, but that does not mean that I should not strive to know more. By setting my sights not on eventually creating a 'theory of everything' or of figuring out the meaning of life, I am admitting that there is uncertainty in the world which constrains my ability to know. Quantum physics taught me that. Quantum physics also taught me that I should not focus on finding the 'actual, real' world, but instead should look to harness the uncertainty of the future in what I am doing at the present. Right now, I am not doing that to the greatest extent, having placed almost all of my eggs in the basket of Oxford. But I am still keeping an open mind. I admit that perhaps the DPhil is not the direction my life will take next (though it is most certainly one I would like to take). The Master's and doctorate are hoops that meed to be jumped through to get to the dream job of a tenured research post, but there are other jobs out there that I dream about, and these hoops may easily be on the way to them as well. In reality (whatever that is!), these degrees could lead in so many directions that it becomes unhelpful to view them as hoops. My interest therefore lies not in the drive to achieve that far off goal, but in the art of hoop-jumping.
~Sam
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