Planning- Day 3

Song of the day: The Once and Future Carpenter by The Avett Brothers

Yesterday, I walked out of a fro-yo shop and a star caught my eye. I basically ran out into the parking lot because I needed to see the rest of the sky to know which star it was. I was in Hickory. My sense of cardinal directions would have been useless anyway. As I placed the brightest stars in their constellations, I pointed them out to my friends who had presumably followed me out the door and immediately became puzzled as to why I ran out into the parking lot. Then I pointed out the planets that we could see and I found the Big Dipper. We had a grand old time in the middle of a parking lot on a Tuesday night with a heavily light-polluted sky.

I’m good at my job.

I say this with all the humility in the world. I can always be better and some days are better than others, but I have a knack for teaching about space and stars and planets and stuff. I enjoy it and I’m good at it. I have emails to prove it. And I’m good at the logistics of my job as well. One of my favorite times of year is September when the world is coming alive again and I sit down with a calendar, a spreadsheet, and at least fifty visit requests, planning out my travel year, sending emails and getting confirmations and settling things. I work around school schedules and work schedules and I make things happen and I love it. And my summers, with all their logistics and planning, are 100% worth it. I had a kid yell out today, “I love science!” If that’s not a sign that I’m doing my job right, I don’t know what is.

And I kinda stumbled into it. I mean, I should have known- I’ve worked with kids since I was old enough to not be considered one anymore and I’m the appropriate kind of bossy for teaching, but I always wanted to be something else. I don’t have a passion for teaching and so I didn’t pursue it. I applied for a job at the planetarium summer camp because I needed a summer away from Granite Falls and everything just kinda snowballed from there. I’m happy it all worked out so well, but I didn’t plan for any of this to happen.

There’s this moment in the first episode of The Office where Jim is doing his interview and he says, "If I left, what would I do with all this useless information in my head? You know? Tonnage price of manila folders?” And it’s funny and it’s a throwaway line and it’s overshadowed by the fact that he then presents us with his knowledge of Pam’s favorite yogurt, but it always stuck in my head. If I left, what would I do with the knowledge that Betelgeuse is the brightest star in Orion with a name that means “shoulder of the giant” and will explode someday in the next million years? Probably use that to lead into jokes about other parts of Orion’s anatomy because I think I will be a perpetual middle schooler in terms of humor, but the point remains: I have all this knowledge. Am I just supposed to let it rot?

Because I love what I do and I’m good at it and that’s so satisfying but… but. But I feel a push toward something else, more than just a flippant wanderlust. I’m not a poet. I’m not an artist. I don’t feel the need to stop doing what I’m doing so I can focus on bringing new and beautiful things into the world. But I do want something more. Something different. I have a disquieted soul, and it’s hard to stay still with that condition. 

I need to step away. I need to be somewhere new. And it doesn’t mean that I can’t incorporate the things I already know and love into something new and it doesn’t mean that I have to leave forever and forget where I’ve been. But it does mean moving on. And that’s not simple.