Starting out

                So, a young woman of my acquaintance has been working her post-college job for several months now and things are going well for her. Which is not to say that she understands how well things are going.  

                Lots of young folks feel entirely - and inappropriately-  comfortable with their choices in their early twenties. I know I did. Looking back, it’s hard to reconcile some of the choices I made  with any reasonable expectation that I was building a life. Having gone into the Navy after high school rather than right to college, I came out with a superlative technical education and extensive hands-on experience in a field in which I would never again work.

                I labored at a number of briefly held and ultimately irrelevant jobs, including but not limited to inventory auditing, serving as a fill-in manager for a hamburger chain, teaching guitar and selling and repairing musical instruments, driving for a scoop-and-run ambulance company, the list goes on. In each case, the job was designed to get me to the next step but I hadn’t mapped out the path to which the steps in aggregate belonged.               

Through all these jobs and a few more  I was going to college, although in this as in my choice of employment  I never got around to defining the path, much less declaring a major. At one point, I left school two-thirds through a semester, earning eighteen units of F in order to play Caiaphas in my third production of Jesus Christ, Superstar.  While in hindsight this was clearly one of my all-time dumbest moves, at the time I had a rationale. And at that age, my future had more to do with rationalization than thoughtful planning.

Add in the effects of a couple of disastrous post-Navy forays into the realm of “true love,” and you have a pretty good picture of my early failure to figure out my life.

In my defense, I wasn’t a total wanker. I’m reasonably intelligent even if frequently not so smart and I’ve always been a hard worker, so with a couple glaring exceptions (I’ve no aptitude for emergency services or running a restaurant, although I have great respect for those who do), I did okay and learned a great deal.  Eventually, I found my way into a string of manufacturing startups, where I generally excelled and which eventually led on a serpentine route to where I am now. And where I am now is quite satisfactory to me and to Mary.

 Contrast this with the young lady in question. She knew where her passion lay from an early age, and spent her younger years preparing to pursue it. She got into a college program against all odds in terms of applicants / admissions that year and earned her BFA with honors. During her college career, she spent time as an intern and later as a seasonal employee with a huge and well-respected entertainment company, building a relationship that through her talent and hard work led to a first after-college job in a VERY competitive field.

So, now that she’s been there a few months, some of the harsher realities are setting in. She’s learning what it means to be truly on one’s own and facing the budgeting woes, planning her moves   and facing down the day to day travails that we all know and love. It’s been a wake-up call that’s probably unavoidable, no matter how well you’ve planned and prepared.

What I hope this young woman understands is that what she’s going through is part of the package. “Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.” And I hope she understands just how far ahead of the curve her talent and hard work have placed her.

When one is pursuing one’s passion and doing so with talent and great insight and plenty of sweat,  everything else is secondary. So I’ll end this missive with a shout out that’s usually used flippantly but in this case is quite apt.

You go, girl!