Walking <= Preaching

St. Francis of Assisi said: "It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching."

My vocational fantasy involves my taking on the role of a latter-day Carl Sagan, using writing to bring the awe and wonder of science to the masses, with a strong conservation message thrown in. I'm a long way from realizing this fantasy. I don't have a solid background in science and my writing could stand some improvement. I am not sure I'm well suited to bring awe and wonder to anyone. I am good at bringing long, theoretical diatribes to the masses, but there's plenty of that in the world already.

It's difficult sometimes to look at how far I am from meeting my life's goals. And I am goal-oriented. I pay lip service to respecting the journey but I only have eyes for the destination. I suspect I'll always have some difficulty stopping to smell the roses. Yet St. Francis's quote reminds me that the journey and the destination are, at heart, the same... or if they aren't, they should be.

I give speeches and tours at the Mystic Aquarium. There's a lot I like about the job, but I've always tended to look at it as a stepping stone. Something I'm doing for now until I can do what I really want to do. It wasn't until I stumbled on that quote that I realized how much of what I wanted to do... that is, preaching about conservation... was something I was already getting paid to do. Yet I don't tend to terribly value it or take advantage of it. I have a lot of complaints. It's hard to give a good speech to a mixed crowd of adults and children. It's hard when you don't have a captive audience. It's hard when people have come to be entertained and not to learn. It's hard to be extemporaneous when my strength is writing. What arises from my day of speeches is like a jumble of rocks compared with what could be sculpted with time and paper and a self-selecting audience who actively wanted to learn about the matter at hand.

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching. Why is it no use? St. Francis would have to answer that, but I'll give it my best student's guess. In the end, it's not logic or rhetoric that moves people, but passion and enthusiasm, awe and wonder. And love. If the sermon is something to be commuted to, something we take a long drive to while our mind wanders, does it differ much from "just a job"? Likewise if I let my attention wander on what I see as a long commute to a writing career and happiness, am I just commuting to work? And will my writing be no more than work?

I am good at bringing long, theoretical diatribes to the masses (thus the blog). I'm not always so good at finding practical applications for theory. I am not going to go in to work tomorrow and find the job suddenly fulfilling. All my old complaints will go on. But perhaps it is a thing that can be viewed as both 100% journey and destination, rather than say... 50% journey, 0% destination as I tend to view it now. As if it's only half-helping me get to somewhere I haven't even begun to approach.

Well, eschewing idealism for practicality, maybe I'll just aim to see it as, say, 75% journey, 10% destination. Mostly helping me to get somewhere that is already a little bit realized.

Maybe that makes it 10% more than just a job. Wouldn't that be nice?