Love what you do?

Yesterday, an old friend of mine came by Columbus High School, both my alma mater and my employer, to do a presentation of his artwork.  Cesar Santalo was always extremely gifted.  His artwork is incredible to look at, and it is extremely diverse.  He can illustrate both life like and caricature figures, he does collages, he does graphic art on the computer and he sculpts.  He also brought in an extremely interesting work of art called an istallation where every object added to the work changes the context of the piece.  It was extremely cool.

Cesar came to address the students at Columbus and I was fortunate enough to be able to pass by and listen.  It was a bit strange listening to him speak because he is such a clown one on one.  Yet here he was all decked out in a suit and speaking as a professional to these young men.  His message was simple.  Work hard and there will be no regrets.  the only regret is when you don’t work as hard as you can, because you’ll never know what you could have accomplished.  Then there was part 2 of his message.  Love what you do.  If you love what you do it’ll never be a burden, and if you love your job (what you do), you’ll never get burned out doping it.  He argues that the more he does his work, the more excited he is to get back to work.

I am soooo jealous.  It’s not that i don’t enjoy what I do because I do.  I’m just not sure that I LOVE doing it.  in fact I started thinking about it, and I’m not sure that there is any one thing that I absolutely love doing.  I enjoy teaching, but it’s not like i wake up in the morning yelling, “AWESOME, I get to see my boys now, and we’re doing INTEGRATION!  SWEET!!!!”  On the contrary, I have to actually get going in the morning and once I’m started I’ll be like, “OK, I can get through this.”   Not only that, I absolutely dread having to grade papers.  This is not exactly the definition of love.  So one can understand why i would be jealous.  i wish that i would LOVE what i did day in and day out.

Then I started to think yesterday, “Is there anything that I truly love that I would be able to get into?”  That’s when I got depressed. I came to the sad realization that either a) I don’t really know what I love to do, or b) I really don’t LOVE anything that I like doing.  What do I mean by that?  Well, there are a lot of things that I enjoy doing, but I am not willing to put the effort into to doing it well.  In my book that means that I don’t love doing it.  PERIOD.  I couldn’t think of one feasible thing that I would like to do day in and day out for the rest of my life.  This is where I go back to my first point.  It doesn’t mean that there isn’t something I would love to do.  I just don’t know what it is.  And the truth is that I don’t have the time, nor do i have the luxury to explore, not with a wife and three kids and one on the way.  i could always stop and start over, but that wouldn’t be fair to my family who have to pick up the slack financially and for that matter would not be able to have me around in the process of finding myself.  And that really sucks.  Royally!

Now, I can’t say that there aren’t things that I love to do.  I love watching movies. Maybe I could have been a movie critic.  Then again, watching movies doesn’t translate into wanting to write about them.  I do love math.  It doesn’t mean that I enjoy grading math papers, or making lesson plans.  Part of the reason that i like teaching in a classroom atmosphere is because it kind of feels like a have an audience.  So maybe I should be acting.  Acting takes a lot of time, though, and it takes a while before you get into a position to make money, if you ever make money acting.

You know, what about writing?  Well, I really do like to write.  Yet, I have a tough time getting myself to write daily.  I easily distract myself into doing other things other than writing many times.  Once I start then I’m good. It’s kind of like when I teach.  Once I get going, I’m good.  But i go through phases.  Sometimes I get inspired and I’ll write two, three weeks in a row.  Then I stop writing altogether for months. It’s pretty sad actually.  So what can I do then to find what I love?  I don’t know. the only thing I do know is that i better take Cesar’s other piece of advice to heart.  Even though I don’t love what i am doing, I have to make sure that I work hard, because the truth is that I don’t ever want to regret not doing my best.  I never want to feel like if I cheated myself.  So expect some soul searching from me in the near future.  I’ve gotta find what I love to do, to make my life seem rich in all aspects, and I have to work my butt off now, and especially once I find out what it is that I love.

There is one thing…  IMPROV?…