Patience is a Virtue

I just updated my Facebook profile (a rare move), and changed my status to read "Kendra Langdon Juskus is hunting and gathering." (A side note here to clarify that I do have a Facebook profile. After giving many disparaging soliloquies in opposition to the thing, Ryan "gifted" me with it for my birthday. I'm sticking with it as an exercise in self-control, trying not to get carried away with self-definition and self-glorification, and resisting the temptation to add too many applications, details, and activities so that it usurps all of my real-life time. But I'm on it. So friend me. Let's make this official.)

I have been hunting and gathering for several weeks, inspired by a few interesting job leads to search the employment jungle, parse out some fruits with promise, and take a bite at them. I do feel like I'm slowly gleaning and storing away some prospects--none that, by my tone I'm sure you can tell, have particularly struck a passionate chord with me. And I think that's because I am also hunting and gathering in another, deeper way. I'm hunting for the particulars of really important things like my identity, my dreams, and my purpose. These are things in constant flux, but their changing nature is particularly acute in this period of life when very few people are legally responsible for me and when my own responsibilities are relatively limited. Meanwhile, the possibilities are endless. When my current job ends in December I can do any of the following:

1) "Become" a writer, devoting my newfound free time to writing poetry, articles, and essays and perhaps vainly shipping them around the country for publication.
2) "Get a real job" in a position that may or may not be appropriate for me, with an organization or company that may or may not do fulfilling work.
3) Buy a house. This has been on our minds lately, but taking this plunge would preclude us from taking several other actions that appear later in this list, such as
4) Move to New York. It's home. A man on the radio last night won tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert and said, as he gleefully thanked the radio station, "Yeah, I used to go see Bruce a lot back up New York way." Grammatical awkwardness aside, there is part of me that never wants to have to say that.
5) Move to a new apartment. With light. Obviously to do this and buy a house at the same time would be unwise.
6) Have a baby. Difficult to juggle as new home-owners, I'm sure. Also may not be something we end up having all that much control over.
7) Move to the country. This prospect seems idyllic at times, probably because neither of us has ever had to wake up at 5am to tend to cattle or try to wade through the vagaries of the the latest Farm Bill as it applies to our lives. Thus we consider doing this in conjunction with people like Wren and John, who actually know how to do it, or Greg, who--we've heard through the grapevine--is suddenly intent on being a farmer.
8) Stop, drop everything, and leave. WWOOF it all over Europe for a few months and return to . . . who knows? At which point the dilemma begins again.

The problem is that while we could do any of these things, we cannot do all of them. We are lodged in reality whether we like it or not, and each of these options carries with it the inevitability of diverse joys and griefs, as does our current life and life in general. Ryan likens our situation to that of pieces on a chess board. Along with our friends--scattered across the nation and the world--we are tentatively taking up new moves and positions, but also watching all of the other participants in the game make their own decisions. If more people move to one city, will we follow suit? If someone does invite us to farm with them, will we take them up on it? If we have a baby, will we leap ahead of everyone else, and be left behind at the same time?

At the same time that all these questions whirl around--and they seem to come in droves, attacking our defenses all at once--I have to remind myself to surmount the situation and look at it from a wider angle. "Patience is a virtue," I often quip to hurried people. It's easy for me to believe this in the context of relationships. When friends who are single or dating get caught up in the momentousness of every little relational detail and begin agonizing about missed opportunities or apparent mistakes, I proffer them the examples of long-married couples whose stories have taught me a lot: a woman who hated a guy in college, but who ended up marrying him several years after graduation and is still happily married to him today; men and women who, after being widowed, have reconnected with high school sweethearts with whom to happily live out their years; husbands and wives who dipped in and out of each others' lives for years before they ever settled down together. The fact that my own relationship with Ryan failed for a period in college often surprises people--surely the road to marital bliss isn't plagued by such blind turns.

But whereas it's easy for me to toss these examples out to others, I, or we, who are all in this upheaval of our twenties together, need to see their parallels with life in general. That of course there are blind turns and potholes and even wrong ways. That most likely, in twenty years I will not regret having passed up buying a condo in Washington, DC, or having a baby in 2008 that I could have had in 2007, or spending a year of my life uploading web content and writing on the side. Most likely we will have a lot of memories, and a lot of stories, and a lot of unwanted advice to give to our children--probably along the lines of, "patience is a virtue," which, like us, they'll probably have to learn for themselves, anyway.