“Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God.” – Leo Buscaglia
My five-year-old daughter has been saying to me lately, “I want to be a scientist so that I can keep finding bigger and bigger numbers to tell you how much I love you.” Aww, so sweet. She gets my attention and a hug every time she says it.
It makes me think of why we choose the jobs that we do – to impress others, to have enough money to feel safe, to differentiate ourselves, to do something until we figure out what we really want to do. I think back to college and why I choose to study Electrical Engineering. It had a lot to do with a man I was dating who was also an engineer and EE was the engineering major that required the most math classes and I loved math. It’s turned out to be a fine basis for what I really like to do which is to solve problems for people. There are a lot of ways to have jobs that help people but that was the route that I took and it’s worked out.
But I winnowed out a lot of other choices. I worked at an engineering firm as a receptionist one summer in college and realized I didn’t want to have a job just sitting behind a drafting table, I worked at the expresso stand in the building that housed the architect majors and realized that the pressure of long lines wasn’t any fun. I spent enough time in the EE labs with other engineering students to realize I didn’t want to hang out with other engineers. In other words, there were a lot of “no’s” along the way.
It strikes me as I continue to wind my way through life figuring out what’s next that the “no’s” are a tool that I need to have more respect for. It reminds me of a story about Thomas Edison who as he tried to invent the light bulb tried a lot of different materials to be the filament. When asked if he got frustrated with each experiment he replied that he didn’t because each one taught him what not to use. That inspires me to both know that even though I’m in mid-life, I am not finished having choices and also to understand that what I don’t do is as important as what I do.
As for my daughter, I assume she will change her mind about what she wants to be many times. I’ll take the hug and sweetness and try to gently steer her towards discerning what is meaningful for her own God given talents.
Surprised By Joy 