Mental meanderings.
Inspiration is our raison d’être that provides a reason we roll out of bed each day and face the world.
Most people find inspiration in the accumulation of wealth. After all, it’s the measurable ROI for our performance of intellectual and/or physical labor.
We work to make money because money can buy us things that make us happy.
Money can purchase the tangible expressions of success and legitimacy.
Money can help us achieve status among friends, family and peers.
Money can make us more attractive to those we want to be more attractive to.
Money can even buy the respect of society.
So, we learn early on that we should develop skills that allow us to make the money required to succeed in society.
We go to school to learn those skills. For the first twelve grades it’s basically reading, writing, math, science. Everyone gets their opportunity at finding what topic or area inspires them through general education.
Then, for those who go on to college, they enhance those acquired intellectual skills with the intention of pursuing useful professional specializations so that they can make above average incomes.
Some find they are naturally gifted in areas like math or science. Their minds easily engage the inherent and often abstract complexities in those subjects and develop their ability to advance society, make the world a better place. They pursue medicine, engineering, physics. They cure disease, build cities, send people into space and beyond. Some take their abilities in math into generating wealth through the financial sectors like investment banking, which funds just about everything else.
Others find their intellectual strengths gravitate toward reading comprehension, logical analysis, and communication. They are inspired to use these strengths in teaching, law and/or politics. All laudable.
But to do any of the above professions successfully requires the winnowing process of post-graduate education. To get there, one needs to academically outperform the other bright lights. That requires a certain intellectually competitive nature. Not everyone gets the post-graduate professional brass ring or the opportunity to accumulate larger shares of wealth that comes along with it.
Now some of the intellectually talented people decide not to pursue a white collar “profession.” They forego the delay and expense of undergrad and post grad education and take their equally developed reading comprehension, math and/or science skills, combine it with their natural physical intelligence and apply it to the less abstract blue-collar employment and trades and begin to make money. They build things. They power things. They fix things. They keep things running. It’s physically demanding work, but they are willing to do it because it allows them to do something they enjoy, using skills they are proud of, while immediately earning a living. No student related debt.
Others use their equally developed intellectual and physical skills and combine it with a heightened fearless genetic predisposition to protect and serve. First responders. Military. They run towards danger while the masses flee. They all collect their well-earned paychecks for their work but find their real inspiration in the repetitive adrenaline rush that comes from using their competitively acquired, well-honed skillsets to protect the citizens, challenge disasters, solve crimes, save others and cheat death.
Every person engaged in any of these areas of employment have my greatest respect.
Every one of them earns and deserves their respective compensation.
Looking back through the prism of my own educational and employment rear view mirror, where I went from working in the service and construction trades to the lofty legal profession, I cannot deny that in real time I drew my daily inspiration to continue solely from the money I could make and all of material things that money brought into my life for me and my family. I was sufficiently intellectually and competitively driven to be technically good at what I did, but I never had a true passion for it. My employment was a valuable means to a purposeful end. The money kept the lights on, but the real ROI turns out to be experiential exposure. It provided me an interesting foundational real life on which to build my fiction.
I cannot deny that now that I am no longer subjected to the expectations of daily professional productivity by society, or the need to support and educate a nuclear family, I find far greater inspiration than I ever had over the past forty years from my present opportunity to just tell stories. Even if there are only five, fine readers that will enjoy those stories.
One happy reader would be enough to make it all worthwhile.
It has become my raison d’être. I have found my daily inspiration.
Well, today is Saturday, and I have my Casa Claire chores to get to.
You fine, five readers should get those weekend errands behind you as quick as you can and engage in enjoying life’s experiences. Find your inspiration.
And no matter what we get up to, let us make today a great one.
