"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than exposure.” - Helen Keller
"I haven't taken a shower yet today and it's 2:11 p.m., and I've spent 3 hours doing things that weren't even on my To-Do list, while my To-Do list has more on it than I could accomplish in three days...Time for another cup of coffee?" - Me
“YOU ARE HERE,” says the “X” on the map.
I look around at my “here”: heaps of papers careen towards my computer, jostling for territory and begging to be organized. An empty “dream board” hangs on the wall straight ahead, waiting to reveal the map for my 2013. A bag-of-bags sits to my left like a lost puppy, forlornly asking for a home (the local grocery store’s bag-return awaits…). Christmas decorations sit boxed beneath the bag-of-bags, not yet tucked away into the appropriate closet. I return to “work”in five days, as an art instructor, but the truth is, I am almost always at work in one way or another, and as the new year dawns, I grow less and less able to shake the nagging feeling that the specific shape and nature of my life’s work still eludes me.
I am an artist and an art teacher, or"instructor” in current professional parlance. After emerging from the challenging yet protective cocoon of grad school a year and a half ago (feels like 5 years), I have taught ceramics and three-dimensional design to art students ranging from elementary school-ers to high school-ers to college kids to adults, while also working as an artist-in-residence at a community-based ceramics studio. My professional and personal life has – since my last semester of grad school two years ago – been defined by a constant, troubling uncertainty. In my field, you spend as many hours a week as you can
“making work” (creating your art), but this must take a back seat to doing whatever it is you do to make ends meet. The idea is that making-ends-meet buys you time until your art work gets “out there”, gains recognition, and said recognition helps land you either the full-time college art teaching job of your dreams, or the sales and funding to focus solely on your art practice. For me, ends-meeting has been made by teaching art, and by helping to run the studio where I work (and in ceramics, “helping to run a studio” always ALWAYS
means being 70% janitor – glamorous, yes?). Truth be told, I love teaching, and have experienced some of my most fulfilling professional moments in the classroom. The two most deceiving things, however, about all this teaching I’ve been doing – given that it looks and sounds like my dream-work at a glance – are
that a)one is massively underpaid as both a community center art instructor and as a college adjunct (or, semester-to-semester, temporary) instructor, meaning one must take on way more money-making obligations than is sane; and, b)one’s job security exists only in 8-16-week increments, meaning every two to
three months, one’s professional future is again rendered uncertain. Sound a little stressful to anyone else?...Lastly but not leastly, doing well at all this teaching has meant little to no studio time for me, meaning a whole gaping chunk of my professional development has been placed on hold.
And here’s the thing: there are many people in my position who are making “it” work: they get out of MFA school, get some kind of teaching or graphic design or table-waiting work, set up some kind of studio, make work, get into art shows, then land full-time teaching jobs at colleges, or start successful businesses based purely on the art they make. What’s my problem, then? Why can’t I get it together and follow this sure-fire formula just like the rest of them? …And, more to the point, why should you care?
Well, that’s kind of exactly what this blog is about. It’s about peeling back the layers of the old “Follow Your Dream” adage to explore the nits and grits of how following one’s dream can be really complicated and confusing, full of conflicting priorities, risks of all stripes (from the scary and exhilarating to the maddening and cumbersome). The closer you get to doing what you love and were put here to do, the more challenging it becomes to discern the exact shape of your life’s work. This blog is about creating a space for sharing experiences of navigating that hairy terrain between moving in the direction of your soul’s purpose, and finding a way to make doing your life’s work work for the whole of your life. Because life isn’t just about your life’s work; it’s about your life, too, and all the other valuable, amazing things in your life besides work: relationships, health, spirit, the miraculous details of daily life, and discovering how to live abundantly in
balance.
This blog aims to delve where all those inspirational quotes leave off: “Leap and the net will appear.”
(John Burroughs) / “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”(Helen Keller) / “Do what you love and the money will follow.” (Marsha Sinetar). The value of these quotes lies in their pith. They crystallize a truth for us in an incendiary, undeniable way. They throw sparks. They get us excited and frustrated with our hemming and hawing and half-hearted living. But, forging the path of one’s unique purpose is a process – not an
all-at-once blaze of glory. And this process, in addition to yielding epiphanies, tiny victories, and moments of great fulfillment, is also full of fear, doubt, struggle, and confounding details such as how in the WORLD will I
pay down my student loan debt EVER and will my right molar fall out before I can afford dental insurance.
I am convinced a need exists for stories of folks who are forging this path, and, especially, for a space where we can share the nits and grits of the process of inching closer to living the life of our dreams. Small victories count. Complicated questions with no clear answers count. Compromises – some temporary, some permanent – are often necessary. And we should not be ashamed to share the truth about what scares us,
about how we had to hack our lofty goals down into actionable baby steps so small, they barely show up under a microscope (and how, even still, these micro-steps scared us), or about how, as we travel further down our new path, we discover the shape of our desires has morphed.
Finally, this blog may aim, above all, to dispel one very prevalent myth – a myth which serves a noble
purpose in our world, but which may be doing more harm than good: that is, the myth that living the life of one’s dreams is worth any degree of workaholism and debt to achieve, and that the destination (a life of one’s dreams) will be more glorious, glamorous, and worthwhile than the journey it takes to get there. I am lobbying (through this blog, and through my own actions) for a new kind of sanity, balance, and attention to detail in the process of pursuing the life of one’s dreams. I am convinced that life is made up of moments, and that every moment we are attempting to live true to ourselves and our purpose, including all our stumbling, fear, and moments (or decades) of being small and playing it safe, are noble and worth honoring. And, I am convinced that we learn more from each other’s real-life stories, in all their gory detail, than we can from a how-to book (as valuable as those are).
So, I’m here to share, and I hope you’ll join me. Who knows what we might discover, or how we may embolden and encourage one another…
Yours,
Truly,
Adrienne Lynch
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than exposure.” - Helen Keller
"I haven't taken a shower yet today and it's 2:11 p.m., and I've spent 3 hours doing things that weren't even on my To-Do list, while my To-Do list has more on it than I could accomplish in three days...Time for another cup of coffee?" - Me
“YOU ARE HERE,” says the “X” on the map.
I look around at my “here”: heaps of papers careen towards my computer, jostling for territory and begging to be organized. An empty “dream board” hangs on the wall straight ahead, waiting to reveal the map for my 2013. A bag-of-bags sits to my left like a lost puppy, forlornly asking for a home (the local grocery store’s bag-return awaits…). Christmas decorations sit boxed beneath the bag-of-bags, not yet tucked away into the appropriate closet. I return to “work”in five days, as an art instructor, but the truth is, I am almost always at work in one way or another, and as the new year dawns, I grow less and less able to shake the nagging feeling that the specific shape and nature of my life’s work still eludes me.
I am an artist and an art teacher, or"instructor” in current professional parlance. After emerging from the challenging yet protective cocoon of grad school a year and a half ago (feels like 5 years), I have taught ceramics and three-dimensional design to art students ranging from elementary school-ers to high school-ers to college kids to adults, while also working as an artist-in-residence at a community-based ceramics studio. My professional and personal life has – since my last semester of grad school two years ago – been defined by a constant, troubling uncertainty. In my field, you spend as many hours a week as you can
“making work” (creating your art), but this must take a back seat to doing whatever it is you do to make ends meet. The idea is that making-ends-meet buys you time until your art work gets “out there”, gains recognition, and said recognition helps land you either the full-time college art teaching job of your dreams, or the sales and funding to focus solely on your art practice. For me, ends-meeting has been made by teaching art, and by helping to run the studio where I work (and in ceramics, “helping to run a studio” always ALWAYS
means being 70% janitor – glamorous, yes?). Truth be told, I love teaching, and have experienced some of my most fulfilling professional moments in the classroom. The two most deceiving things, however, about all this teaching I’ve been doing – given that it looks and sounds like my dream-work at a glance – are
that a)one is massively underpaid as both a community center art instructor and as a college adjunct (or, semester-to-semester, temporary) instructor, meaning one must take on way more money-making obligations than is sane; and, b)one’s job security exists only in 8-16-week increments, meaning every two to
three months, one’s professional future is again rendered uncertain. Sound a little stressful to anyone else?...Lastly but not leastly, doing well at all this teaching has meant little to no studio time for me, meaning a whole gaping chunk of my professional development has been placed on hold.
And here’s the thing: there are many people in my position who are making “it” work: they get out of MFA school, get some kind of teaching or graphic design or table-waiting work, set up some kind of studio, make work, get into art shows, then land full-time teaching jobs at colleges, or start successful businesses based purely on the art they make. What’s my problem, then? Why can’t I get it together and follow this sure-fire formula just like the rest of them? …And, more to the point, why should you care?
Well, that’s kind of exactly what this blog is about. It’s about peeling back the layers of the old “Follow Your Dream” adage to explore the nits and grits of how following one’s dream can be really complicated and confusing, full of conflicting priorities, risks of all stripes (from the scary and exhilarating to the maddening and cumbersome). The closer you get to doing what you love and were put here to do, the more challenging it becomes to discern the exact shape of your life’s work. This blog is about creating a space for sharing experiences of navigating that hairy terrain between moving in the direction of your soul’s purpose, and finding a way to make doing your life’s work work for the whole of your life. Because life isn’t just about your life’s work; it’s about your life, too, and all the other valuable, amazing things in your life besides work: relationships, health, spirit, the miraculous details of daily life, and discovering how to live abundantly in
balance.
This blog aims to delve where all those inspirational quotes leave off: “Leap and the net will appear.”
(John Burroughs) / “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”(Helen Keller) / “Do what you love and the money will follow.” (Marsha Sinetar). The value of these quotes lies in their pith. They crystallize a truth for us in an incendiary, undeniable way. They throw sparks. They get us excited and frustrated with our hemming and hawing and half-hearted living. But, forging the path of one’s unique purpose is a process – not an
all-at-once blaze of glory. And this process, in addition to yielding epiphanies, tiny victories, and moments of great fulfillment, is also full of fear, doubt, struggle, and confounding details such as how in the WORLD will I
pay down my student loan debt EVER and will my right molar fall out before I can afford dental insurance.
I am convinced a need exists for stories of folks who are forging this path, and, especially, for a space where we can share the nits and grits of the process of inching closer to living the life of our dreams. Small victories count. Complicated questions with no clear answers count. Compromises – some temporary, some permanent – are often necessary. And we should not be ashamed to share the truth about what scares us,
about how we had to hack our lofty goals down into actionable baby steps so small, they barely show up under a microscope (and how, even still, these micro-steps scared us), or about how, as we travel further down our new path, we discover the shape of our desires has morphed.
Finally, this blog may aim, above all, to dispel one very prevalent myth – a myth which serves a noble
purpose in our world, but which may be doing more harm than good: that is, the myth that living the life of one’s dreams is worth any degree of workaholism and debt to achieve, and that the destination (a life of one’s dreams) will be more glorious, glamorous, and worthwhile than the journey it takes to get there. I am lobbying (through this blog, and through my own actions) for a new kind of sanity, balance, and attention to detail in the process of pursuing the life of one’s dreams. I am convinced that life is made up of moments, and that every moment we are attempting to live true to ourselves and our purpose, including all our stumbling, fear, and moments (or decades) of being small and playing it safe, are noble and worth honoring. And, I am convinced that we learn more from each other’s real-life stories, in all their gory detail, than we can from a how-to book (as valuable as those are).
So, I’m here to share, and I hope you’ll join me. Who knows what we might discover, or how we may embolden and encourage one another…
Yours,
Truly,
Adrienne Lynch