Right on, George Eliot

"But my strong egoism has caused me so much melancholy, which is traceable simply to a fastidious yet hungry ambition, that I am relieved by the comparative quietude of personal cravings which age is bringing."
- George Eliot to Mrs. Congreve, as quoted in My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead

I apologize for the absence of new postings on this blog. I seem to have lost hold of the whip's tail this month and simply run in circles to avoid the stinging end. I did manage to send my application to the Regis University MA program and I'm crossing my fingers that my essays came together. I typed them willy - nilly whenever I had twenty minutes in front of the sax lesson, the water polo game, or a baseball practice. When one pursues an MA in writing one should submit well-written essays, after all. If only the schedule would cooperate!

Yesterday I had time for coffee with a dear friend who is searching for her "encore career." She's reading a book about our stage of life and the author recommends evaluating past professional and personal experience to determine what pursuits continue to resonate decade after decade. We are experts after 10,000 hours of practice (this fact also courtesy of Malcolm Gladwell), so it seems logical that we would pursue a career in the field where we have accumulated that amount of time. Hopefully we like that field and have chosen to pour the time in; if we hate it and were forced into the hours then perhaps the encore might diverge from a previous path.

For me, swimming and reading/writing are definitely continuous ribbons in my life. I may not change the world, cure a deadly disease or solve the global warming crisis by teaching swimming or writing, but I'm certainly "on my thread" and using my thousands of hours of practice to the fullest degree. When I was reading Rebecca Mead's book, My Life in Middlemarch, during Aden's water polo practice I was startled by Eliot's quote about her ambition. She could easily have been speaking for me. It's lovely to move from desiring an Olympic gold medal to seeking a job as a swim instructor, and helpful to be free of wanting to write the great American novel, instead focusing on writing only short bursts that fit my time and my current thoughts. This "comparative quietude of personal cravings" is not a perfect state but it is a pleasant one. I hope the encore lasts a good long time.