Grad School Week One

The other day I began wondering if getting my master's degree might be a big mistake—all that time disappearing.  Truthfully, I'm intensely ambitious in the present only.  I do make a hobby of crafting big goals for my life, but I suspect it's just because the act of making plans is such an engaging pastime in the present.

Trying (and failing) to think of one long-term goal I have set and actually brought to fruition, I realize I may have a commitment issue.  The immediate pain of losing time to spend with friends, work on my manuscript, play my piano, watch movies, and play WoW makes me feel I've lost something.  Not to mention all those activities are immediately gratifying: a level gained here, a chapter polished there, a phrase suddenly becoming smooth under my fingers.

This isn't the first time I've gotten into one of these self-questioning frames of mind and rationalized my way out of a commitment, either.  But wait!  This story has a happy ending, after all.

Instead of feeling discouraged, I did something uncharacteristic, something I haven't done before: I visualized my future.  I love to hate the word visualization, mostly because my mind generally refuses to craft a clear image.  In this case I don't think I needed one.

All I needed was to imagine how it felt.  I let my imagination wander, curious where it would go: I imagined my sandaled feet disappearing beneath  a long skirt, eyes in their comfort zone hitting matte black at every angle.  I was backstage, but on a quiet day, surveying.  Something smelled like sawdust.  I imagined a group of jovial adults gathered there to rehearse in the evenings, much like the groups I used to perform with—a pit orchestra wedged between empty seats and stage.  Kids in a classroom reading a script for the first time, maybe even one they had written.  Opening nights.  Music.  A small office, tidy, maybe with a secondhand couch, that I may or may not walk into with a baby cradled against my body in a sling.

I may never have this.  Life has a way of handing us something slightly different than we had planned.  But in imagining what I could create someday, I made my current efforts seem worth it.  I guess this is what overly optimistic types call "keeping your eyes on the prize."  I don't think I ever thought about what that means.  Now I have an idea: when it's hard to see past the and nots (and not having endless hours to wander through writing and singing and aimlessness), sometimes we need to reach out and touch the thing we're working for in the end.  Because in reality, 18 months is hardly any time at all.

And as a creative person, that imagining shouldn't be so hard to do.