It’s been quite awhile since I have visited and posted on this blog that I created six years ago. A lot has happened in that time, most notably an attack on the Capitol by a president who couldn’t accept a peaceful transition of power and a world-wide pandemic with its attendant economic and social repercussions.

On a more personal note, I retired from my job. More than a job, it was the career I’d been searching for since graduating from college. Fifty or so years ago when I was in college, I’d settled on English as a major; most everyone asked if I would become a teacher. It seemed that most everyone in my purview, at least, thought that was the only path for an English major. I would usually answer “No,” just because I didn’t want to do what everyone else expected, not because I had any other particular ambitions. I had a vague ambition of becoming a writer, but hardly a clue as to how to go about that. I know now that I never really possessed the level of ambition I came to recognize in the writers I admired. 

As it turned out, after lots of twists and turns, I ended up in Education and I loved being a teacher. Despite my initial resistance as a somewhat rebellious young adult, I have been teaching in some capacity for close to thirty-five years. 

Ambition – 1) a strong desire to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work. 2) desire and determination to achieve success. New Oxford American Dictionary. 

I did work hard at it when I returned to graduate school as a forty-year old. Maybe it just took longer for me to become ambitious. It took losing my parents in my early thirties to awaken the desire to do something worthwhile with my life. It took a lot of false starts to become a “successful” writer, whatever that is. I don’t think I’ve ever had the strong desire and determination to be successful enough to make some kind of living from writing. Though I did teach writing and always wanted to do that well. I think I DID do that well. It took coming to terms with the bouts of depression I had been through since childhood; that took a few good therapists, the right prescription, and a deeper understanding of a practice of meditation. It also took a series of unfortunate choices in my search for a life partner; a search I gave up sometime in my fifties. But, that’s another story altogether. 

So, now that I am retired I can return to this blog, among other things. Those “things” can be anything. It’s odd that the message sent to young people, particularly in this country, is typically some form of “You can do and be a success at anything you want.” Odd because that message, while well-intentioned, carries more weight than is apparent on the surface. It opens up so very many questions. What DO I want to do? What does it mean to be a success? How do I achieve that success? These are questions I saw early on. Since I couldn’t really answer them definitively for myself, I decided I was simply not ambitious enough. 

I’m beginning to think that this might be a uniquely American problem. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” is loaded with possibilities, but so open for interpretation, the phrase can also be the source of frustration for any American who feels unsatisfied with their lot in life. Again, that is a whole other line of thought to pursue some other time.

For me, now that I can have the liberty to do anything I want with my life, now that I have achieved retirement, one thing I can “do” is blog. Which is something that didn’t even exist when I had those vague thoughts of becoming a success as a writer. Is one simple blog, among millions, when AI can churn out a post in seconds, enough? For the moment, for me, it is.