Pursuing praxis

About two and a half years ago, I made my first trip to the American Museum of Natural History. Six months prior to that, I had discovered what to do with my life. City map in hand, I stared thunderstruck at the columns and turrets and magisterial magnificence of the AMNH. Here was a building that architecturally honored my chosen endeavor in life: the study of life, the bare-bones way. And I had interviews with the illustrious curators of vertebrate palontology. By my request. I was there to convince them to take me - an experience-less, no-name, starry-eyed, hot-to-trot aspiring grad student - as their sole doctoral program admittee for the fall of 2004.

Well, they didn’t take me. They (and Columbia) made the right choice in taking Sterling instead. And now I’m back, in the mammalogy department instead of vertebrate paleontology, doing precisely what I’d barely permitted myself to imagine two years ago. I’m living my dream, there in the castle, in some remote crevice of a room overlooking Central Park, wedged between dusty old cabinets and poring over bones like books in Alexander’s lost library.

And it’s not till after hours, like this, that I even stop to notice the fact that I’ve sailed right past a dream. It’s so natural that I forget that all this wasn’t a given, even six months ago. More to the point, it’s because my goals are already five steps ahead, and I’m impatient to get there.

And you know what? I wouldn’t change it, not one time in a hundred. I’m glad I’m not all starry eyed, and phoning friends to tell them of my conquest, because then I’d be rotting the very mind-set that got me there: forward-thinking, resolve, confidence, and the attitude of a civilized warrior. It’s a lone fight, and it always will be, at heart.

I’m glad intellectual pursuits aren’t like sports (especially marathons), where your whole life is dedicated to a single moment - crossing the finish line - where life afterwards is a comparative void. My life is a series of simultaneous finish lines and starting lines, such that I’m always running five races at once, and achievements become stepping stones, and the prize I’m after is not static, but a dynamically increasing enticement, and its identity (and limit) are set only by me. I don’t celebrate stepping stones, but I very much celebrate the fact that I’m in the particular race that I am, and the satisfaction I feel is proportional to the the prize that I’m after.