Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Often I wonder how people discover their calling in life. A lot of this curiosity comes from a persistent disbelief in my own journey. Writing books of poems? Not even remotely on the radar as a kid. I teach in a university to earn a living; I write out of a love of language. I enjoy both equally, which is to say, I find a way to unite my avocation and my vocation, “two eyes make one in sight,” a famous poet once put it in a poem. This past spring, like every spring, many of my students graduated into the uncertainty of their futures.

Their lives can take so many directions. I am curious as to what ultimately launches us as human beings with a purpose, or not. If ever we meet as new friends, I will likely ask what you do for a living. In some scenarios, my inquisitiveness can sound like prying. But what I am really asking is what makes you happy — to really live.

On airplanes, among many unique professionals, I have sat next to a comic, an accordion player, and a chef. The chef fell into his job through a series of serendipitous events; he helped a friend cater a small wedding after being let go from a finance job. The comic knew since high school that she loved to make people laugh. She has pursued her passion for nearly two decades. She’s undeterred by sparsely attended shows; she writes and performs jokes every weekend. The accordionist emerged, well, from a family of accordion players.

My favorite is hearing of people who embark on a path after years of delaying a long-held dream; one, a chocolatier, another a cabaret singer and landscape designer. They admitted to long conforming to expectations before quitting their jobs to undertake activities that they longed to pursue. My stepson completed a degree in Political Science then promptly enrolled in flight school. One too many courses on international relations made him contemplate a career as a commercial pilot.

Jobs do not determine our worth, and against the popular belief that our lives are mapped for a singular linear journey once we graduate from college, today’s poem finds an existence in which one’s ultimate meaning is found in their self.

The Way
by Cynthia Cruz

But, I don’t understand 
anything. And I am trying
hard not to. What the world
wanted, what it wanted of me.
But underwater, I like the way
my body looks when swimming
in summer, and alone. An amber blur,
like music when it enters the unexpecting 
body. Unfathomable, an energy.
Or static coming off the satellite
radio late at night 
from a distant, foreign city.
When I was little I wanted 
to be famous. Beautiful, an actress,
maybe. That was before I knew
things. And now sometimes I want
nothing but to run for hours
through the forest,
inside the deep silence
of my own body
and its mind.

“The Way” by Cynthia Cruz from HOTEL OBLIVION © 2022 Cynthia Cruz. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.