Lives I'm not living

In the three years that have elapsed since graduating college, I've grown up quite a bit.  Much of this can be attributed to natural maturation, as well as to the demanding responsibilities and earlier bedtimes associated with a full-time job.

Another, somewhat inevitable, part of getting older is reflection, frequently accompanied by mock despair.  Though a often the subject of reminiscence and joking among friends, the cold reality of passing time also lends an element of existential angst to these musings: Have I chosen the right career?  Should I be concerned with getting married and starting a family?  Am I happy with the direction of my life? 

Mostly I can dismiss this worrying as silliness, brought on by thinking about the future as something increasingly immediate and less theoretical.  I recognize and am endlessly grateful for the fact that I lead a fantastic life.  Yet I find myself wondering if, while cheapened somewhat by their melodramatic tone, these are real, valuable questions that I should be pondering at this point in time.

I work as a marketing and business development coordinator for a local architecture firm.  Although I've learned a lot in my three years on the job, and, through my participation in the professional organization SMPS, am frequently exposed to peers with admirable bodies of accomplishments, there is nothing about my work that inherently moves me.

While I get a degree of measured pleasure from completing a proposal or receiving a compliment on my performance, it is mostly fleeting rather than personally fulfilling in any kind of meaningful way.  And though I look up to many of the more experienced marketers that I've met through SMPS, it's difficult to try to emulate their success without wondering whether or not "Marketing Manager of a D.C.-based architecture/engineering/construction industry firm" is really what I want to be in ten years.

Although this is something I ponder occasionally, the reason I've been focused on it so acutely the past few nights is Dr. Marsha Guenzler-Stevens.  As anyone who has ever attended a formal reception at Maryland knows, she is an unbelievably talented speaker.  Beyond her inspirational rhetoric, I also have an enormous amount of respect for her ability to remember seemingly small things about everyone she meets, no matter how briefly.

Marsha delivered the keynote address, as she's done for the previous two years, at last Sunday night's O.N.E. UMD conference, a networking dinner with current and former student leaders that I attended as a recent graduate.  She structured her speech around the principles of the Leadership Challenge, a model that identifies five crucial attributes of great leaders, and spoke glowingly about former students who, through their time on campus and their achievements after graduation, embody each of these concepts.

Maybe it's the fact that I actually know one of the people that Marsha mentioned, or maybe I'm just a sucker for an inspirational speech (I am), but hearing about all of these impressive feats struck a chord within me.  It's not that I necessarily feel a need to save the world, and I have no illusions about finding a perfect job at which every day is fun.  But the idea of dedicating my life to something about which I am incredibly passionate is appealing on a very deep level.  I want to feel driven to do work that makes me, and other people, proud.

The problem I've always had, from choosing a major to trying to apply for jobs, is that I have trouble envisioning exactly what would motivate me to such a great degree.  I'm reasonably sure that anything that would truly excite me, at least initially, would involve living in a foregin country for a period of time.  But aside from that, I'm just not sure.

Steve suggests that I explore new opportunities gradually, in the hope that something will stand out.  Though I certainly don't disagree with this approach, and try hard to take steps to expose myself to exciting, new experiences through traveling and volunteering, for example, I worry that this is not enough.

Maggie has a thought-provoking quotation splashed across the bottom of her blog from Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

If I were ever going to make a dramatic change in my life, ever going to pick up and move to some exotic locale to pursue a new passion, the time would be now.  As the years pass, I'll likely develop increasingly more connections and responsibilities at work and in my personal life.  Any combination of an advanced career, a house, or a family would make it difficult to justify taking such a drastic step.

There are times that I can picture my potential future, as an experienced and reasonably successful marketing professional, volunteering on the board of SMPS.  This path could certainly be rewarding, in a lot of ways, and the longer I stay in my current position, the more powerful the inertia that holds me in place.  But, by the same token, each day that I spend here, commuting through traffic to do work that I don't think I love, the more convinced I become that I need to seek out something more fulfilling.