Waiting for the punchline

I am deep in thought soup lately. With some real life friends and with some really amazing blogging women, I have been engaging some fundamental life questions that have been plaguing me for a good couple of years now. The questions all sort of run together at the edges, and basically they are questions about how we organize ourselves and how we take care of each another and how we share our toys and how we make a difference. In grown-up words, the topics sound all scary and harsh and off-putting: legislating morality. Drawing the line between basic human rights and personal freedom. Existential angst. Lingering post-colonial oppression. Environmental consciousness. Civil religion. Passion and complacency.

All this stuff is gurgling right below the surface in me, both the kids' version and the harsher grown-up stuff. The thoughts are multiplying and mingling freely with my huge open question: where to go and what to do after this? Somehow I have the feeling I am standing at the threshold. I am being given the chance to start over a year from now, to bushwhack my way through the jungle of indecision in any direction I choose. Theologically, of course, this newness is nothing new: we are created anew each day--every day is a beginning, a chance to wake up, to rearrange slanted priorities, to live, to love. But practically, how often do we get to finish something up so neatly, to tuck in the corners and sign off at the "X"? In one year, my contract is up; I am done, I need to move on. At this point, I am realizing, the sky is the limit for me. I am alone, I am at least somewhat educated, I am (over)privileged. Pick a country, pick a career, pack up your two suitcases and head off into your fate. Or vocation.

But what is it, for Pete's sake? Where is that perfect blend of my deep longings and the world's deep needs? Is there any way I can live out the paradox of giving myself selflessly to a cause while retaining my own identity with fierce determination? I am on the brink... and soon I will have to set off in one direction or the other. And I really am confident that when the time comes for me to make a decision, I will do it with integrity, choose something that will send me down the path where my life can make a little difference somehow, a tiny dent in one of those grown-up issues. As usual when I start thinking hard, I am reminded of an Indigo Girls song lyric: Up on the watershed/ standing at the fork in the road/You can stand there and agonize/Till your agony's your heaviest load. But eventually you have to stop agonizing and decide, and then pour your whole heart into the next step.

In this quest for understanding, I keep coming up again and again on a literary soulmate, a scientist whose life only overlapped with mine by two years, but whose words sometimes relieve me of the need to search for my own. Margaret Mead was a woman who really and truly listened, and found the inherent logic and beauty in that which was foreign to her. I think I am going to try to listen to her voice a little more closely for a while. Here's a start: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."