Tag: academia

Eclecticism

I once had one particularly resonant life truth pinned up on my bulletin board among many other nuggets scribbled on bits of paper that spoke to me.

“Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose.“

It was more a visceral understanding of that truism than an actual “knowing” that spoke to me. No question I was interested in a great many things as a young woman.

Life dictates you cannot possibly pursue all interests that pop up. Not if you want to achieve any depth of success in any chosen field.

In that respect, journalism was a reasonable path to follow. I got to ask lots of questions about lots of things from lots of strangers. And then I could actually publish or broadcast what I learned. I also got into a lot of high priced conferences by flashing my press credentials.

I worried a lot when I was young about the trap of commitment that making choices and becoming successful requires.

What lay under that fear was constantly questioning whether I was good enough to do anything. I understand that is quite common among human beings. Moreso among women I understand.

I can’t imagine why. (That’s sarcasm right there in case I needed to explain…. Girls do that.)

In the upcoming generation, I feel increasing societal pushback against the extreme standards and expectations that are put on women. There used to be a chart that circulated about how women’s leadership skills compared to how men’s skills were characterized.

He was assertive. She was bossy. He was determined. She was pushy. And so on.

It has always been a devil’s bargain. No matter how well women do, it seems, someone is always ready to “qualify” their success. It took me a long time to understand that.

So I bounced around a lot in my so-called career. Had a lot of jobs. Did some of them more or less well.

I actually enjoy being eclectic. It beats the heck out of being docile and predictable. At least that is what I told myself. Often.

Looking back, I see the truth that eclecticism was self-defeating in respects. But I also dodged a lot of bullets.

I watched senior, single academic women nursing Manhattans in bars after classes were done. I watched another former peer striding proudly as the flag bearer at the front of the annual academic procession during encaenias.

I have watched peers and colleagues zig when maybe they should have zagged at certain junctures in their lives. I know I did a few times.

All the intensity and love they poured into their careers and the strangers that once perpetually peopled their days have now disappeared. They are left with themselves and what is left from that life to comfort them in their dotage.

That seems like a very poor bargain to strike in life to me. Maybe I am speaking from a place of security and safety I had never previously known. Maybe I am a jerk and the truth is I couldn’t keep a job to save my life so naturally, I kept moving forward and moving around.

But I look back on some of those eclectic experiences with satisfaction and huge measure of gratitude for having done some of the things I did.

Trips to the Arctic, Argentina, across the Andes, all over Europe and parts of Asia. High up into the Himalayas. I saw some things that won’t leave until I do.

Young people now seem to prefer collecting experiences over “things” as our parents and grandparents might have. Vast amounts of material possessions are fated for the garbage dump when boomers start kicking off in droves.

I am of the Boomer generation and feel blessed to have adopted a life strategy of accumulating experiences over everything else well before my time.

I am not promoting eclecticism as an optimum life choice. I get and have experienced that spreading your interests too thin can backfire on you.

But I will argue I really didn’t feel I had much other choice. In my bouncing from thing to thing and author to author and one philosophy over another, I finally landed in a place where I feel myself settled and grounded.

For today anyway. It is both the curse and certainty of having an eclectic bent of mind that nothing is ever settled “finally and forever.” Not until death, perhaps, and lately I’ve been questioning if seeking will end even then.

I guess one day I’ll find out. For now, I’m going to scan my eclectic collection selection of saved recipes and see what dish I can concoct that I’ve never made before to see how it works out.

Seems like how I have greeted every day and experience since I’ve been on the planet. Why quit now.

Artistic Long Game

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”​—Glenn Gould, Concert Pianist

This quote says so much about what I believe. An artistic path is not necessarily the most financially lucrative pursuit. There has to be something else in it that makes people pursue their art. Or else not many people would pursue art in spite of painfully thin paychecks.

People usually start out in life with vague hopes and dreams. Finding out what they are and manifesting those hopes and dreams is a major preoccupation of young people. Along with learning the basics of what it means to be good citizens, young people set out to fill up their quiver of basic marketable skills.

I silently smirk when I see misleading ads promising would-be writers how to acquire the required skills to make thousands and thousands of dollars a year as a freelance writer. The so-called skills they are touting are misleading, to say the least.

Writing success is an alchemy of talent, opportunity, luck, and mostly hard work. But mostly it is stick-to-it-ism. Writers write. Every aspiring writer knows the sober adage to “put their bum in the seat” and stare down the blank page.

I am bemused by scads of advice currently circulating about developing your voice, setting tone in stories, and developing characters and plots. I have been in the writing business my whole life. I had never seen it treated as much like a “business” as it is today.

Writing was historically generated by people with a basic talent for writing. Producing copy for stories or novels or articles was a type of alchemy. The story was the thing. With the right storyline in the right context with great quotes and color commentary on where the story was based, under the skilled attention of a gifted writer, voila! a decent story would be born.

There was a hierarchy in the newsroom I worked in. We knew who the steady and reliable producers were. They could be counted on to bang out stories on cue and as needed.

Along with those steady producers were writers of varying talents with varying dependability. But if they had won jobs in a newsroom, you could at least assume they knew how to write.

Writing as art evolves. In my experience, the art of writing emerges when an individual begins to develop and use their own voice. So much writing is formulaic. It isn’t hard to teach someone how to write according to the standard inverse triangle required for newspaper articles. Broadcasting copy whether for TV or radio was much the same. Learn the formula and you can do the job.

Creative writing is another avocation. There is something that develops inside an individual when they dig deep to manifest the stories and insights they harbor inside their hearts and minds. It requires insight and curiosity and the ability to ask questions that needed to be asked. This is harder to define but most people recognize superior writing when they see it.

This can take a lifetime of repeated practice by working at their craft. As time passes and the craft is further developed, good writers start to abandon hyperbole. Clear writing is a result of clear thinking. And clear thinking comes from refining and exposing the essence of the stories writers want to tell.

Ernest Hemingway nailed this. His writing was delivered in short, staccato-like sentences that could sum up the beauty or ugliness of a situation in a few concise words. Hemingway started as a journalist and that style ultimately defined his novel writing style.

I have often been bemused by my own writing journey. After a few short years in a newspaper newsroom, I went to university. My first year of university generated many comments from professors about my “choppy, journalistic” writing style.

So I learned about “padding” in university. I would add as many high-sounding, convoluted words as possible to make my academic essays sound profound and knowledgeable. Mostly my essays were simply full of “fat writing.” Why say in ten words – the academic attitude seemed to be – what you can just as easily say in forty-five? No wonder academia is recognized as a game.

Success in academia was mostly guaranteed by the degree to which you could parrot exactly what the professor had doled out in lectures. Original thought and ideas were not as encouraged as one might think in the hallowed halls of education. Conformity was the bigger goal, not originality. Who were we to question the geniuses we were studying?

So I was happy to be reminded by Glenn Gould’s quote that pursuing an artistic path is a path to cultivating peace and serenity and wonder. It is a lifelong pursuit. It is also a very individual one.