March
I've heard that March was originally the first month of the year and got pushed back to being the third when two months were added before it. In the same way I took lines from the homepage and moved it back here. These thoughts worked best when considering them after the prior chapters because it details why I started this in the first place. This is how that happened. In 2018 I was at a concert and the person next me was asking me about what I wanted to accomplish in life. It occurred to me after this discussion that much of my current line of work wasn’t what I ultimately set out for. It wasn’t what I dreamed about before planning on my life’s path.
There is this talk by Alan Watts that got me thinking; “find the thing you really want to do and do that and forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living… that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after-all if you do really like what you are doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master at it. The only way to become a master is to be really with it. And then you will be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. Somebody is interested in everything and anything you can be interested in will find others.”
I like that reasoning a lot. It allows me to put my time into something I will be happy with and proud of. I recently started a PayPal so that I can work towards the ongoing maintenance of this site. As much as the site contains now when I write this in May 2023 it can be far more. I want for it to go beyond being my personal project to growing into what can only be possible with the aid of a team. With a steady income of all this work it would become sustainable in the long term. In fact I already have several people in mind and have contacted most of them. Much of my previous work was almost entirely done just for making money and no other reason. Now there are many reasons and I believe that is the goal of a career; continue to expand the rationality for what you are doing.
There is a line from The Verve's 1997 hit "Tryna make ends meet, you're a slave to money then you die" Like the play on the previous page Pippin was constantly on looking for the reasons he was doing the jobs he chose. Anyway I am looking forward to where this all goes and whatever avenues it may lead to in the future. My hope that it dovetails into work that has a purpose and I never get stuck into just working for any reason other than doing the best work I can do. The underrated Shawn Mullins deep cut "Twin Rocks, Oregon" reflects on what a person ultimately value verses what he got paid for.
"I thought he was an old man,
He wasn't but 37
He said he'd been ridin trains
For 15 years
Drawin portraits
To keep his belly full of beer
And I saw him lost
And I saw him found
He said "I don't know what I've been
Lookin for, maybe me..."
Well, I told him I too had been
Travelin around
Livin out of my van from town to town
Playin for tips and whatever records
I could move
I said "I don't reckon I'll be
Makin it big,
You know it's hard to get rich
Off a tout of coffee house gigs"
And he said…
"yeah,
but ain't it a blessin To do what you want to do..."
