Where in the World

Trying to find one's place in the world is one of the hardest things some of us ever do.  It's more than just trying to find the right major in college, and then changing it a year later. It has to do with what each of feels we need to be happy, or at least content. What we're passionate about, what makes us feel desire, what nightmares play through our head after we shut our eyes just before we drift off to dreamland, and what lessens those nightmares.  Friends may come and go along the way, feeding different desires and fear as they do, and will ultimately impact where we finally fall among they great many possible routs our lives could have taken. Some forget, you always have more power than anyone else at controlling how happy you are with where you are, and if you are not happy with where you are, you can always move.

I'll invent something to help discuss and measure how well people feel with what is happening in their lives; I'll call it the contentness factor (referred to as CF).  This value is controlled my many variables, but in essence it represents how close people are to where they want to be. 

Example: For someone who is whole-heartedly bend on becoming a veterinarian, getting accepted into a good vet school would probably increase the CF, while failing to be accepted would decrease the CF.  The same person might have a higher CF in vet school than in pre-med because they are close to the final goal; however, if the person was very content just to be doing everything he could to be a vet, then his CF in pre-med may have been just as high.

Certainly one's career is one of the many variables the affect the CF.  Personal image may be another. Social life, popularity, fitness, financial strength, sex life, companionship, education... the list goes on as long as there topics that influence people feelings.

Now we can make a cute little equation. We'll say each of these variables is actually a sub-factor of the CF. So, we can say that the variable that represents one's career is CF_career.  Each of the variables can be assigned a sub-CF in the same manner. So, in abstract we have variables CF_a, CF_b, CF_c, CF_d, CF_e, etc. The sum or these we'll say equals the infamous CF.  Just for you people who like symbols:

CF_SUM = CF_a + CF_b + CF_c + CF_d + CF_e + ...

or maybe the average would be more accurate so that additional factors would not greatly affect the CF. After all it's the average of all of the things in your life that make you're overall feelings, not the number of things in your life.

CF_AVG = (CF_a + CF_b + CF_c + CF_d + CF_e + ...) / n

but what if popularity and fitness aren't as important to you as your education, but you'd still rather be fit than popular.   If you think education is twice as important as popularity, we could give it a coefficient of 2.  Fitness might then get a coefficient of 1.2.  So, we'll ad coefficients to the equation, making sure that it won't artificially inflate the CF.

CF_AVG = (aCF_a + bCF_b + cCF_c + dCF_d + eCF_e + ...) / (a + b + c + d + e + ...)

Just to review incase you didn't follow, the variable a, b, c, d, and e represent the relative imortance an individual feels toward each sub-CF, denoted CF_a, CF_b, CF_c, CF_d, and CF_e.  Each sub-CF is just how satisfied (or content) a person is with some aspect of their life. We can express it as a fraction, between 0 and 1.  If my formula is right, the CF (or CF_AVG in the equation) would be a value between 0 and 1 that rated how contend people were with where they were in their life, 1 being perfectly content, and 0 being completely unsatisfied.

Passion

Through middle school and high school, every time any talk of planning for the future, of choosing the right classes, came up, it always seemed that the topic of jobs versus careers did too.  Jobs, of course, are things people do for money, where as careers are field that people get jobs in. 

The analysis can be deeper than that though. Jobs can be in any field, doing any kind of work that one is qualified or able to do. Careers are usually fields people put effort into studying so that they may better get jobs that they want.  The whole point in having a career is being able to focus ones interests so that the person may better qualify for jobs.

But where to focus? Somewhere you're interested? possibly. Somewhere that's fun? maybe. Somewhere that's easy? could work.  Some combination of these? more likely.  It is foolish to suspect the everyone need the same thing from their career path. While it may be unlikely for people to need only something that fulfills any of those categories, I would suggest that most people need some combination.

I can't assume to be ably to apply this to everyone, but the combination I need is something I'm going to call passion.  For me to be passionate about something, I have to have and interest in it, but interest alone is not enough.  It needs to be fun in it's own way, and it must not be too difficult, because I'll get bored and frustrated otherwise. If I get bored or frustrated I know I'll not be able to follow through, at lest not without an amount of conviction that I find difficult to muster.

So, if passion is a must, then I must choose a field that I am passionate about.  I've told some people that I'd have majored in several things at the same time, if I could. Botany would certainly have been one, but so too would have been computer science. I think psychology, Spanish, and something creative like film or photography would have made the cut too.  Really, if I could I'd take Chinese, French, and Arabic in addition to my Spanish, just so I could talk to nearly anyone. Of course, that is highly unreasonable for me at the present.

There was a time last year I was torn between a career in Botany/microbiology and computer science. I suppose that the living side of that choice won out just in time to make it on my application.  I know I had a passion for science all my life, and plants were a large part of that especially up into high school.  My involvement with the American Chestnut Foundation is small evidence of that.  I was passionate about chestnuts. I was passionate about helping fix Earth's problems, especially correcting human blunders.  I think I am still passionate about helping people, fixing their mistakes, and paving the way for a better future, but the work along the way is tripping me up.

I'm currently taking some of the advanced plant biology courses that will help me "save the world" some day, and all of the material (at least the majority) is very interesting. The problem I suppose comes in part with the tediousnesses of the work. Memorizing the life cycles of a dozen different organism seems pointless giving the millions that exist. The electron transport chain I've seen before, but never in the depth we've now discussed, but why didn't I feel like learning it to that depth? Where is the passion to find out as much as I possibly could about every process; how and why it works? 

Maybe it's just lost in the flood of new information. Maybe it's lost in the confusion surrounding my relationship turmoil. It is true that academics didn't seem as important when it looked like one of my friends was having a breakdown, and our close mutual friend turned on me when I tried helping her.  I'm still getting back on my feel from that one.

In Young Life we had a discussion about how many of the leaders loose the passion to lead for periods... but that the important thing is to remember why you are doing it, and to keep pushing yourself to do what you need to.  Eventually the passion will come back.  I'm taking things out of context again, but I'm hoping that this will apply to my Career. I want to see that passion in biology again. The passion to learn.  For now I'm trying to stick it out, because the threat of failing out of school is too great.

I think I'll survive this battle. It's a hard one, but I'm not so weak as to fail. And when I do get the upper hand, I'll be that much better for having done it.  Prayers are always appreciated along the way; however.