Ambition

It's a funny thing. Up until a few weeks ago, I had never really considered myself to be an ambitious man. My professional career is in a satisfactory way, and nothing more. I will never be a famous scientist, nor make a breakthrough discovery that will outlive me. My work is reasonably good, trustworthy, reliable, but never earth-shaking. Over the long course of years, the harsh environs of academia have ground down much of my enthusiasm for scientific progress, and have slowly convinced me that there are only ever about six good ideas going on in any scientific discipline, and they are simply reshuffled, dressed in different uniforms, and generally buffed up from generation to generation. Good work using those ideas can sometimes result in useful stuff that helps us to understand who we are or that can sometimes even help us build new things. On occasion, those new things are even things that we should be building. But more often they're not. I don't mean that to sound particularly bleak or pointless, but reading over these words suggests to me that they're a bit jaded, perhaps. I also don't mean to sound as though I'm unhappy with any of it. I'm content with what I do, know my limits, and feel sorry for those who are a bit younger than me and who seem to take all this stuff far too seriously. But, other than the occasional insomniac set of thoughts that make me wonder how things could have been if I'd done things a little differently, put my work more to the front of my priorities, worked a bit harder in the years immediately following tenure (those years are the most risky in some ways -- there's just such a big rush of relaxation that you have to push hard to get anything done at all for a year or two), I'm pretty happy with my lot. I have a better life than almost anyone that I know well and, when I contemplate all of the horrible things that could happen to me, I marvel that none of them have happened yet (though I know that in time they will. It's inevitable that I will know future horror. So will everyone else).

What I find funny about all of this is that I'm now teetering on the brink of having gone from being a smug, self-satisfied sonofabitch to something else that may be better or worse than that. I can't even decide. From the moment that I discovered that I might be able to publish my book (oh, here he goes again....book book book), my self-concept has undergone seismic change. There are long parts of days when I can think of nothing else. My mind becomes absorbed with the job of trying to understand how the book industry works, of reminiscences of the amazing people I've met over the past few weeks and of the things I've learned. I find myself worrying about the second book. I find myself wondering whether I will ever be in a position to cut myself adrift from this job, this geographic location (which has everything going for it other than the lack of mountains and oceans). It makes me sad in so many different ways. It makes me sad to discover that I seem to be 'good enough' to write professionally, and that I waited until near the end of my fifth decade of life to find this out. It makes me sad to watch my visceral reactions to every little bit of good and bad fortune and, to recognize in those twisting guts, pulsing veins, and cerebral lightning storms that this is what I've always wanted. Always. Since I was a teenager. The massive lost opportunities inherent in all of that make me sad. And then I get sad because I think of all of the profound life lessons I drank in last year while living in our ocean paradise, and I feel as though I have many days where I've completely thrown them out the window. Just when I think I've made some progress, that I may have some faint glimmering of who I am and what I want, everything explodes again and I'm reconstituted. The happy carefree beach dwelling buddhaboy becomes the ulcerated pathetic would-be public intellectual who knows, deep down, that if he really gets what he's asking for. And I mean really gets it, it will probably kill him. Or, if not, then at least it will make him deeply unhappy.

It's a complicated little existence I've made for myself. Without really intending to, I've left the deep pool of calm happiness that floated me away last year. I've scrabbled about halfway up the cratered walls of this pool. I know what's at the bottom -- those cool, cleansing waters. But I'm too far up the wall to let go now. I'm looking up into some kind of mysterious light up there. I don't even know what it is. I find myself pulled to it, but I'm having some heavy moth thoughts here. I'm halfway. Going back down will be hard and might break my heart. Going up will be harder and might break my soul. I think I'm stuck.