“If there is no struggle, there can be no progress…” Frederick Douglas
moocowinthecity When I went into my meeting with the Shaliach; I had set in my mind how much work I wanted to do; how much labor I believed (and still believe) is fair and what compensation I believed (and still believe) is adequate – not what the minimum requirements are, not what I could ‘get away’ with.
However, many of my family friends are pressuring me to do the minimum; are raising a thousand fears that I simply do not share with them…our approaches to life are so different. I respect their worry and their concern…but there’s something empowering about struggle (as anyone who has ever slipped into subspace can agree with and knows).
Without testing yourself, without becoming creative in the most trying circumstances, without pushing yourself…you will never know what you are capable of. I am in competition with no one but myself. My benefit is that I’m 22 which means that I’m already one year passed the age of majority (21) and soon to be 23…that brings with it responsibility, but also the luxury to listen to concerns and then judge whether you want to make them your own or not and to belay the ones that you disagree with.
I do not believe that anything in my first five years will be a cake walk, though I talk about it positively and with optimism; I do so because that is how one should approach anything that will be a difficult path to walk, any trying period. I have often said that if you know where you are and where you want to be, then you have already determined the outcome…you know that success is yours, there is no cause for worry or panic…you have dictated the ending…now you’re just finding the path that will take you there…existentialism at its most simplified form.
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t want it to be easy either, and that’s the point. I essentially walked into a negotiation, agreed that four years sounds perfectly reasonable for what they’re offering…and even if everything they’ve offered after four years is pulled out underneath my feet, I know that I’ll land standing…I have always had the ability to find some way to get through things, to network, to get what I want…just because I change location doesn’t mean that those skills don’t come with me or that they simply vanish.
They keep bringing up the case that I was only in Israel for a little under a month, so I don’t know what it’s really like to live there and what if I hate it…what if I truly detest it and that there’s so many intricacies to the language that I may never fully get it.
Addressing the first point, yes, I don’t know what it’s really like…you don’t get that until you take the dive and actually live there. It’s a catch 22 that allows those who want to have second thoughts or who allow themselves to be overtaken by fear to give themselves an excuse for not jumping. Unacceptable. You want something, you go for it. End of story. I cannot respect someone who lives their life wrapped in a safety blanket, living without risk – without risk, you can’t have success…the two go hand in hand…even if you spend 1.00 and win 1,000,000…you still risked loosing that dollar.
As far as the second point goes, if I hate it, if I loathe it, it’s four years…try living sixteen in the closet, after that, four years of anything…is nothing. It’s a challenge, it’s a test. I don’t run away from things that I dislike…I go up to them, I approach them, and then I dominate the fuck out of them. You just do it. You work through it. You take each second as an individual moment in time; and one second quickly turns into a month which in a flash turns into a year…and before you know it, you’re done and it becomes an experience, part of something I learned…part of what made me who I am.
For the third point: I raise you a 3.8 Linguistics GPA; and letters or recommendation from every professor I’ve ever had since freshman year, even in a three hundred person class, who have all remembered my name (even when we bump into each other at the airport – well, all except that art history professor, but he was banned from Greece for illegal digging, so we’re not going to count him) and what paper I wrote for them…I have more then enough faith, after five and a half years of academia and academic success, that I can pick up the language.
There is no job that is beneath my dignity (short term)…I have a vision for how I’d like to be living by the time I’m 40 and what I find acceptable professions at that age and how I want my apartment or loft or flat to look; but to get to where that is, I’ll work three jobs and stand on the corner at night if I have to; all with no shame. My Grandparents called any job “opportunity.” You do what you have to do, to get what you want; you don’t give up on something because it’s hard or it’s going to be difficult or the first four years will suck so you sacrifice the next ninety that will rock…you don’t look for the easy way out…and once you start approaching things as fundamental building blocks and experiences that will inevitably get you what you want…at that point, you get it.
…of course, when you ‘just know’ what it is you have to do; that has a tendency to freak people out…because so many people are unsure of where they are and what they want; those two points so necessary to remove fear from your life…though I imagine over the next four years after I make the move, all but my close friends will see the humble, quiet, observant side of me rather than the boisterous side…as what’s necessary to allow oneself to properly observe and to integrate and to fit in is being able to bring out your quieter and more endearing characteristics.
In other news though, I really do need to email my Shaliach today (after I fax her my Kibbutz Application) and ask her, in writing, to re-list my benefits, and also I do have serious questions about internet connectivity while I’m on a Kibbutz (not that I play Warcrack, but I would like to be able to know if I’m going to be able to send emails or not and how exactly that works in whatever place I go home to on the weekends…worse case scenario, I’m sure I can ask one of my friends to babysit my laptop).
Anyways, time to shower, then fill out the Kibbutz Application, then Breakfast with my Rabbi at 8am…I do have an actual post coming…at some point.