Recognizing the Next Frontier

“Oneness is achieved by recognizing yourself.” So my Yogi teabag told me this morning.

Each December 31st is the time of the year when we collectively look back. When we humans – or at least Americans as I know them, or at least the people whom I know, or at least my family, okay maybe it is just me… -- anyway, so now is the time when I reflect on the year that was and take stock of me and my life. What’s different, what’s endured, and what might I want to consider doing differently. Rarely one to rely on the calendar, the seasons, or the weather to determine my mood or my movements, this year I feel drawn to musing on my ahead based on my behind.

The last year was quite a series of trials for me: the beginning of it was spent hunkered down in a dry docking maintenance availability where virtually all of the machinery under my purview was either out of the water, unlubricated, or otherwise disassembled. Hundreds of hours of complex testing, networking, and constant oversight on the part of painfully few of us got the plants back together and the ship back to sea. Through this and part of the spring I fought and trained to get in shape and run farther and faster than I had done since my left foot had been reconstructed in the summer of 2003. I was supposed to leave sea duty sometime that spring… four consecutive years and multiple prolonged underway periods had taken its toll on my patience, my marriage, my head. Spring became summer and by the end of July, I was finally at liberty to go. Headed to a billet that was the backup to the backup billet, I knew very little what to expect.

As any of you who have been following the episodes of “As the Polygon Turns” since September know, there was an unusual learning curve for me, adjusting to life on a Staff. I’m not saying I’ve got it licked now, but suffice it to say that I foresee the drama of the early Polygon days subsiding. Just this morning I did some kick-ass staff work and I feel I have really made myself indispensible. –but we’re not here to reflect on just today.

Earlier this month, a golden opportunity presented itself to me. I learned of an opening for a speechwriter position for a prominent individual. At first I thought it might be a position beyond my capabilities and one that might involve more working hours than I should reasonably want to accept on shore duty. I asked around, talked it up, and took a long introspective journey back into my files to discover the Me as Writer Past, Writer Present, and wondered if I should choose the dreamy path of the Writer yet to Come. The process involved submitting two writing samples, and as I canvassed my files, I found an array of goofiness, tear-jerkers, poetry, heart-felt letters, and scholarship that probably barely interested my professors but always enriched my own literary soul. I have been really enjoying this nonsensical blog for the past several months, but could I become a real writer… for real? I found my answer in this piece that I wrote over six years ago (entitled ‘Calling’):

“Over the various adventures and travails that have beset me since I joined the Navy, since I was in college, since I was an adolescent, since I was a born, I have labored with language, with writing (maybe I didn’t labor with writing when I was a kid, but I did have a noticeable stutter). My worst fear was for people to define me by a single epithet. I wanted to be more than just a fast runner, a good swimmer, a good base line shooter, an athlete, a person who gets good grades, an English Major, an NROTC Midshipman, a Surface Warfare Officer, a Nuke, a nutcase… Whenever I heard myself labeled as such I would raise my right index finger and say, “but wait, there’s…” some other thing I can do really well that contradicts whatever you just tried to label me as. Through my six years in the Navy and over the past year that I have spent trying to re-integrate myself into academia, I have come to realize that the only single epithet I would be happy with is to be known as a writer.

“I have moved in many circles and have conditioned myself to excel in various, often incongruous, activities; in so doing I have come in contact with all different sorts of people and have gotten along with them marvelously and appreciated their company insofar as it passed the time and made life, living, and working more enjoyable. Beyond such basic and ephemeral intercourse and interaction I have never been intimately bound to any one person (or even one activity). At some point along the road of interaction and experience, people always fail me, connections break, and I am left with myself to forge ahead, light out on another path, with my head in the clouds, ear to the ground, nose to the grindstone, knee to the groin… in search of another connection, another chance to lose myself in a cause, to devote myself to a reputedly noble duty or to answer someone else’s calling.”

That was Me about seven years ago. Not an unhappy Me, just one not fully committed – or maybe one who should have been committed (to an asylum). Since then with the help of those whom I love and a love for what I do, I have focused my heart, my head, and my soul on people and purposes. And I can say that I am proud of what I have done and am, but I still at bottom long to be a writer, an author.

I put my package in for the position. We’ll see if I get it.

If not, whatever! In the spirit of my mother, there’s always room for new frontiers in goofiness. That at least, I recognize.