One's brain reels

"To live is to be slowly born" - Antoine de Saint Exupery

There were a couple of options in starting this - I could have afterall, written this post last night. The outcome would've been far more glum. I have been madly working on (and procrastinating) my next assignment by doing all kinds of fun social things and I'm sorely tempted to just get offline and immerse myself in The Moonstone (which happens to be what I'm reading at the moment) which isn't really social at all - nevermind, but for the sake of getting something down and while things are looking a little bit more like they belong in an optimist's world, I shall continue. If you go back a few lines to where I started, that quote, however beautiful, speaks pretty much to me of life in all it's pain and messiness. It might be a tad extreme to parallel my life exactly with that, but life is not neat. I guess the comforting thing about that quote if you run with the metaphor is that some kind of miracle is the end result. I know that life isn't all pain. Life isn't all horrible. Life is on the most part is quite good but for the sake of an argument I hardly need to make, there certainly are 'the pits'. If I wanted to keep running with ridiculous metaphors, I'd say that uni and the career thing is my pit and the moment and I get to wield this shovel and can't quite work out if I should dig myself into it or dig myself out of it. Early yesterday I had a fairly decent conversation with Adrian - who is my tutor for Studio and a fantastic guy, who remembers his students as humans. I was the only one around for the first 20 minutes or so and he was asking me how I was finding uni. I confessed again, (After last week's and previous miserable experiences) how uncertain I was about continuing the course. He asked me about my interests, an easy kind of question: writing, theology, photography, some multimedia stuff like blogging... and he did state pretty plainly that I should definitely go where my interests are. a) I'll enjoy it b) I'll be good at it because I enjoy it. And told me to find something that combined my interests - believe me I've tried - but I can't help thinking I'm looking down a hall way and only seeind doors instead of the birds-eye view. We talked a bit more about what I would want to do if I didn't stick with Interactive Media. A far more difficult question which I still do not have an answer for. As far as things play out there are a couple of alternatives. None of which I have yet taken the time to properly look into. A rough idea: Tabor to study more theology, my mind and heart would love it, but I don't know where it would take me, Teaching, but if I did that I think I'd want to wait a bit, Writing, I worked out probably 'no' to doing it as a course focused thing a while back, Work and delay all career moves which is not a good option and I shouldn't have bothered mentioning it. Last night (where the glum post isn't). I chanced across a couple of quotes that I have been familiar with from the past, both in actuality and themeatically.

"The place where God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." - Fredrick Beuchner "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." - Gil Bailie

Being where I am (BIM) does on the most part frustrate me incredibally. I think that I've talked before about time-wasting and how I don't feel all that intellectually challenged by the work and those around me at uni. It is wrong I think now, with 24 short hours of hindsight, to pick those quotes and the depth behind them and pin the label of career onto them. Which is what I sort of did in my tired state last night. Ultimately a lot of what I'd like to be on about isn't around career at all -I really couldn't care less about the piece of paper - but I do care about what I'm doing with my time. This casts things in a massively different perspective. This afternoon I said how scary it is how easily I swing from, "I need to get out of this course" to, "Yeah maybe I can do this". What I am doing is highly dependant upon the choices I make in regards to how I'm going to approach it. It is not senseless to pursue a career. It is not senseless to choose otherwise. It is thoroughly ridiculous to be sitting in something stuck in a rut of complaining about being there and not bothering to use that time effectively. It's also a very, very easy thing to do. If there is one thing you could pray for me at the moment, it would be about this - because regardless of whether I'm being intentional about thinking it or not, the people around me do not shut-up about talking about their dissatisfaction with everything they can find a name for, which essentially makes me think about it anyway. If you were to ask me which was my favourite subject this semester I'd be hard pressed to choose as I don't particularly like any of them that much. I would eventually settle on Systems Design, despite the horrible assignments, incapable tutors and the endless chatter during lectures. So, today the lecturer (She is fantastic) for Systems, digressed on this glorious tangent about paradigms and multimedia and other big exciting words like inoculate. I got all rather inspired and perhaps saw some light/possibilities at the end of the 'era' (ie: when I leave uni). It's no real secret that project management stuff/design does interest me, and the rest of the class I kept finding these weird parallels with the methods and techniques in designing systems and with life/God stuff/theology. So I left encouraged and with the idea that maybe I can stick with this afterall and maybe it is relevant. I do however need to decide to care and decide to get enthused about what's going on and clearly pick out what path I want to take within this massively massive field. And of course in the meanwhile, in the intervening time, in the duration of whatever I'm doing, I need to follow the golden rule of usability testing - doing it all the way through instead of just at the end when it is far too late. And by that I mean, keep living now how I believe God wants me to live and stop hanging so much off 'what happens when I get there'.

"It does one good to feel that one had still a brother who lives and walks on this earth; when one has so many things to think of, and many things to do, one sometimes gets the feeling: where am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? And one's brain reels, but then such a well-known voice as yours, or rather a well-known handwriting, makes one feel firm ground under one's feet." -Vincent Van Gogh

And thats the other half of the whole equation... Who am I 'travelling' with? But community and the like is encyclopaedic. Tacking something small and smartly ugly on the end can wait. It deserves it's own space.