Future plans

This is another post where we talk about where we think we might be headed in the future. I've been very happy being a stay-at-home dad for the past year and a half, and had a mild amount of success and a large amount of growth.

However, I am, currently, taking a few hesitant steps towards beginning my return to school. I could, of course, get a job, but we are still betting that riding out the end of the recession with more school is still our best bet, as long as we stay out of a substantial amount of debt.

So here it is. After a lot of soul searching and weekend discussions and family research sessions I am (in the process of) applying to graduate programs to get either a Masters of Library and Information Science (although the different schools give this degree different names) with the idea of being a librarian or information specialist at some level, but more likely a university or archive or a Masters of Divinity with the idea of being a minister in the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Let's talk about what I'm thinking about, everyone's favorite topic. This will be information overload, but this post is serving a secondary purpose of organizing my thoughts on the topic.

Library Science vs Divinity Degree

Similarities:
-Obviously, both means reading lots of books.
-Not exactly high powered careers.
-Both programs have many more women than men.
-The prospects for jobs in both seem to be similar. A lot of librarians/ministers are supposed to be at the age of retirement but are putting it off due to the recession. Also a lot of libraries and churches have seen their budgets crunched and are cutting positions rather than hiring. Hopefully when I'm done with a 3 year degree, things are looking better. I could probably pick a path that is experiencing more growth now, but not seeing a lot of those anyway, unless I want to try my hand at shale oil exploration.
-Both would be quite enjoyable and fit my disposition and interests.

Librarian Pros:
-I will always like books.
-I will always like computers, although I still shy away from the full on computer geek world.
-I like the idea of the librarian's main mission being distributing knowledge, especially as technology speeds up that progress.

Cons:
-I've worked with a lot of librarians. They didn't seem to be inspired by their jobs on a regular basis. (But maybe I'm just looking for a peaceful way to provide for my family).
-I would almost certainly have to work as a librarian on campus in addition to going to school to get any sort of additional funding

Minsister pros
-I love reading about religion. There's no subject more interesting to me right now.
-I love the UU church. It just fits so well. The Mormon church is like the family I grew up in, which will always be special, but the UU church feels like the close group of friends that I actively chose, except they won't abandon me for some girl.
-A place to make a meaningful impact. UU ministers don't just take care of their congregations but are also focal points for social engagement on a whole range of social justice issues. Librarians also have a real impact on the lives of people, but not on the same level.
-A likelihood of getting a decent amount of funding without extra work, as the national UU association has scholarships available for potential ministers.

Minister cons:
-We've only been UU for a little over a year. I feel like I'm rushing into it a little (although rushing into relationships has worked out okay for me in the past). I envision us in UU for the long haul, but I also envisioned us in Mormonism for the long haul a few years ago. There's the possibility of us going fully back to the Mormon church, but even greater is that we become more fully un-churched in the future and find our social engagement somewhere else. At least there's no divine doctrine to have a faith crisis around.

So there's that. Next. Here are my top three program choices, which are probably the only ones I'll apply to for now, and some other options:

University of Wisconsin: School of Library and Information Master's Degree

This degree has been on the table since we came to Wisconsin and it's what I've been telling people my future plans are for a while now. I think this degree still remains in first place, but only slightly, just because we've thought about it so much and it is the only option for attending a real graduate program without leaving our current house.

Pros:
-No relocation
 *We love Madison
 *Established and mostly free child-care for the kids
 *Lots of friends here already
-In-state tuition
-Cait would not have to relocate at all while finishing her degree
-Competitive program
-I could get work on campus from the beginning
-Cost of living very reasonable

Cons:
-The program has slipped from the top-tier of schools in the last few years
-It has an emphasis on public and elementary school librarians, whereas I am interested in being a college librarian or using the information science aspect to do more technical work
-Madison is not a great place to get a librarian job if we want to stick around, because the system is glutted with students and not that large

Seattle University School of Theology: Master's of Divinity
Pros:
-Near some of Cait's family, and her parents have talked some of moving out there too as the only of their kids to have settled down at all have settled down there.
-Upper west-coast, where we've always felt would be a cool place to live
-Not a UU school, but they have classes for UU and lots of UU students.
-Better weather
-A distance learning program while Cait still has regular commitments on Campus and then a year or so in Seattle while I finish up and Cait works on dissertation

Cons:
-High cost of living
-Not a UU school

Starr King Theological Seminary
Pros:
-In Berkeley, which would also be a good place for us
-Great weather
-An even more flexible distance learning program
-A specifically UU school, with all the connections and opportunities that should bring
-Close to Davis where my friend Gordon is now (but for how much longer?)
-More scholarship opportunities as a potential UU minister

Cons:
-Even higher cost of living
-Are we too liberal for Berkeley?

Other options:
-Distance library program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UNC Chapel Hill. Lots of library science programs offer distance programs, but these are the two best schools, so they would be my first choice.
-Some other distance library science program that is not as good, but cheaper.
-Meadville/Lombard Theological School. This is the only other UU school, and it offers a distance program that includes three week long intensive study periods on campus spread throughout the year.
-Move to Boston and go to one a half-dozen UU friendly theological schools
-Nashatah House Theological Seminary This is a fairly conservative Anglican school, but the only one close enough for Cait to commute that is certified by whatever association certifies schools to produce UU ministers. Also the campus seems really cool. But I'm not sure the UUA would accept a degree from such a conservative school, or if we could fit in with the community.
-Look for a school where cost of living is cheaper, although theological schools seem to end up in high-end places.

Place and time

The ability of a specific time and place to generate certain feelings can often be really amazing to me. The prime example, is of course Christmas. Not only does the Christmas season hold so many pleasant memories for me as to make it the most highly awaited time of year, except perhaps for summer after a long winter, I have also found that I can recreate the feelings of the season almost at whim just by listening to music or reading a Christmas themed story.

Is it possible to infuse that much meaning into the rest of the year? That much feeling and that much joy. I’ve found that if I stop and observe for just a few moments, I can always find something in the way the sky looks or the way the breeze smells that will recall to me a pleasant time or will put me in a pleasant mood.

It does seem that nature is the best place for me to really find that special feeling. Nature is never static and always offers a new face to contemplate and with which to converse. Perhaps, if I work hard, I can also turn inward to find a new me every day that recalls other “me”s and brings back similar pleasant memories.

Love

What does it mean to really love someone? I'm talking here mainly of staying in a committed relationship, I suppose, although the conversation might also apply to other situations. So much of our society today is focused on love as the all redeeming force for good in our lives. How are we to conceive of that love is one fo the main questions, I think, confronting our society. In most of the movies, in the books, in the songs, there is this idea that you see someone you are somehow "meant to be with" and then you "fall in love" with them, and that is how you decide which person on earth you are supposed to be with.

How is that anyway to run a life? I have a really hard time believing that there is much else working in those situations besides sexual attraction. But then again, maybe there is something more to it. It seems, in some ways, similar to "feeling the spirit" in LDS context. Is "feeling the Spirit" anything more than feeling an inner comfort by conforming to a clannish idea of God, who is a artificially constructed God whose main purpose is to drive that conformity within a society. There are, as I see it, clear societal reasons to band people together if willful clans, especially earlier on in our evolutionary history. I don't know if we will ever get past this clannish thinking, but maybe it can expand to the whole human race.

Anyway, maybe that kind of instinctive desire to conform is what really is "the Spirit" in our minds, but then again, maybe it is something more. Maybe there is a sort of "falling in love" that is bigger than simply an evolutionary guide to reproduction. But if that is the case, how high in the hierarchy or behavior should that "falling in love" be placed. I mean, do you only "fall in love" even at it's highest possible sense, only when you are single and available? What about when you have been in a relationship for decades? Does this higher love demand that you cut off whatever other relationships you have in order to follow it? I don't think that can be a fully acceptable way of living life, because even if there is some higher love, there is always the possibility of confusing it with some sort of sexual attraction.

I like the idea presented in the book, "the fault in our stars" that true love, is at it's core, keeping promises you didn't even fully understand in the first place. Maybe falling in love can be some kind of trigger to make you realize that the relationship you are in is really damaging to you, and there are much better options out there, but much more likely, I think, is that the promise of much better options is all illusory. That the proverbial grass must always be greener is eventually not going to be true. And every time you abandon an actual love in your life to find something else, you are going to have left a part of yourself behind, become more jaded and more hardened and less capable of love. That doesn't always  have to be the case, but I think it is foolish to believe that you can bounce from commitment to commitment without weakening the reality of your commitment each successive time.

The real value in love is that you have to work for it. Dan in real life says that love isn't a feeling, but an ability. An ability that must be cultivated and worked for, not something that is fallen into. I like that idea and feel its truth.

Privilege

How are we to best help people who are fundamentally different than us. They can be fundamentally different from us on all sorts of levels, including race, gender, age or orientation. Is there really a way to reach out to people whose experiences are so different from ours, without invalidating their own personal experience. I feel this particularly acutely as a white, likely soon to be midd-class, Christian, English speaking male. In other words, I sit at a place of privilege unknown to all of human history. Just that I can sit here typing on this amazing machine, with free time, money in the bank and food in my cabinets, and having no distinct possibility of losing all those things, puts me at a place of security that most people would have done anything to arrive at.

The cost that this position seems to bring, however, is that even if I were to want to reach out to people who are not in as privileged of a position, it seems to be almost impossible not to do it in a condescending manner. So much of post-colonial thought seems to be a pushback against this idea that my position of privilege makes me any better suited to solve the worlds problems than any other person on earth. Sometimes, it even seems that my position of privilege actively inhibits my ability to help, rather than enhance it.

The most obvious solution seems to be working to gain an inner recognition that I am not any better than anyone else, even if my position of privilege would cause me to want to think so. The fundamental principle of that would seem to be the recognition that material success does not equal emotional, spiritual or in any way meaningful success. If I can seek to learn from others, than I can learn to be a part of their solution, rather than imposing my own.

But how far can this really be taken? Is empathy the only real goal, and do I have a greater responsibility to cultivate it than others? Does great power come with great responsibility attached. Right there I think I slip into it again. Is material wealth really power in any meaningful sense. I've read the idea in several different places that money can't by happiness, but that poverty can inhibit it. So do I really have in my power the ability to alleviate inhibitions to unhappiness? Or, as so often seems to be the case, the fact that money comes from someone thinking they are helping someone lower than them to reach a higher level end up doing more harm than good?

And moving on from money. How much does my empathy really matter? If I were to do all I could to study the culture, history and societal factors that go into, say, the life of a rural Indian woman, am I any better suited to helping her, or working with her, or whatever, than I would be otherwise. Is any help, compassion or empathy that I work to develop hopelessly tainted with the privilege that I have done so little to earn.

My one hope is that I can work to eliminate the idea of myself as a privileged being, simply because I am privileged in material ways, and look to redefine that concept in my mind. But the corresponding fear is that I would simply use that redefinition to abjure myself of any responsibility towards my fellow human.

Working to me

How do we reconcile the difference between who we are and who we want to be. How are we supposed to know that who we want to be is even achievable or that if we got there to who we want to be, we wouldn't just want to run back to who we were? I never can quite be sure where I am supposed to be at any given moment, in terms of what the best response would be to whatever situation that I am in, but I am often aware that the response that I am currently given is nearly completely unacceptable by whatever measure. How do we know what it means to be whole, when all we have is our entire life on unwholeness behind us. Is wholeness a worthy goal, or is it, in its impossibility or boringness when achieved really a disqualifying factor.

I was just about to spell check unwholeness, which I know is not a word, when I saw it's replacement "unholiness." There does seem to be something about the idea of holiness that really appeals to me, even though I am not sure what it means. Wholeness seems to be too vague and self-centered to be the ultimate goal in life, sometimes. But holiness, a wholeness achieved through harmony with something bigger than ourselves, seems to have a great appeal to me. I've met people who seem to be "whole," who seem to be exactly what they want to be and are "meant" to be, whatever that means, and they are complete jerks.  I think that is probably the main problem for me, then, that wholeness is too temporal, that there seems to be something about it so concerned with this kind of psychological, temporal, carnal mental health, that it leaves untouched that inner desire to be something so much bigger than even our earthly potential would deem the ultimate end of our existence.

How to achieve holiness without it being a competition seems to be another vital factor. What is the right word for holiness when it is simply a comparison to other people who are deemed, in that terrible cliche, "less holy than thou." Probably religiosity. This idea that living a religion is a replacement for living a faith. I know that I've been through times where religion has often replaced faith. And even though those terms had a lot more definite meaning for me a year ago, I think they still hold meaning now. What does it mean to have a faith in something that you are not really sure even what it is? I think maybe that kind of faith could be even more powerful, perhaps. The idea that faith is not believing in this pre-defined deity, but an active search for an understanding of a bigness somewhere out there that is bigger than can be comprehended. Maybe that bigness is the Tao, maybe it's God, maybe it's just the peace and tranquility that appears to be available to everyone in this life who is willing to make an effort to get there.

That kind of faith seems to be, in some way, more connected to that idea of bringing myself to a place where I feel that I have reached a more acceptable state of being me. I don't have a great idea of what the perfect me would be like, but I have a belief that in trying my best to find that me, that the journey will be worth it, and that, somehow, even if there is nothing to find, searching will do me more good than settling.