Jack and the Master

“Jack of all trades, master of none.” Sometimes I feel like that phrase sums me up. Mind you, these are my thoughts in a time when I’ve been out of work for three months, and even though a recent interview went promisingly, I will probably be at home for at least one more. I’ve never considered myself a person to be defined by my job. It’s something that I talked about in my last entry. A job sets boundaries and stable elements in your life, things you can count on. When there is no job, you’re forced to confront the after-hours version of yourself every minute of every day. I’d like to say that at no time have I found myself tense and irritable because I’m not sure how I should spend my time, but I can’t.

Part of it comes from the fact that I don’t know how long I’m going to be out of work. If I had an end date in sight, or even if knew that I was never going to hold down a job again, I could at least start to rework my world with that in mind. As things stand today, I really don’t know how long it will be before I have to be up at seven o’clock in the morning again. There’s no point in drastically altering who I am or how I perceive myself, because I could get a phone call at any moment that would change it. (I probably won’t, at least not for several weeks, but I *could*.)

I didn’t mean to digress so far… what was I saying? Oh yes, Jack of all trades, etc. Sometimes I feel like a fool because I don’t have more ambition. Folks who have gotten somewhere in their lives, those who have achieved what they wanted to, are all driven by either ambition or passion, or a combination of both. Maybe I’ll just use the term “passion”, because what is ambition anyway but a passion for being in a better place, a better social or economic position?

So I guess what I’m lacking is passion for any one thing. I’ve always been interested in a spectrum of things, not necessarily related, and pursuing any one of them never lasts for long. I tend to go through phases of interest, but there’s no one through-line. It sounds like a bland, directionless existence, doesn’t it? But there are real flashes of passion there. They just don’t last. As a society, we tend to term success as a person who doggedly pursues one thing, through good times and bad, never giving up on it, never ceasing to believe in it, never doubting that it is what they were meant to do. But doesn’t it sound psychotic when you put it that way? To me, it kind of smacks of desperation. Aren’t people, by nature, supposed to grow and change? Aren’t our interests, beliefs, and truths supposed to evolve as we grow and learn? Devoting your life to being only one thing – say, a lawyer or a restaurant owner or a car salesman – and never thinking that you want to be (or *could* be) anything else, starts sounding like self-delusion to me, even a stubborn refusal to grow.

Of course, the problem is that if you never stick to being one thing, you never really excel at it. That’s what I meant by the cliché I started this entry with. I think I’m passably good at a lot of things, and I can pick up new things to competency pretty quickly. I just don’t find many things interesting enough to keep following. I’m a firm believer in artistic self-expression, but it seems like the only kind I’m interested in are those that are mine and mine alone. In high school, I toyed with the idea of being an architect, because I loved the designing process, but when I started to think of all the other people I would have to be involved with in order to get even one building made, I lost interest.

Same with film-making. I’ve always loved films, but the thought of being the one person making decision after decision on a movie set, being the one person everyone is looking to for direction, and the necessary detail that goes into every frame, makes me want to not even get into it. A perfectionist I’m not, and even though I know there are filmmakers who just let the pieces fall where they may, in general those aren’t the films that interest me.

I guess that’s why, for me, it always comes down to writing. It’s one of the forms of artistic expression that are mostly distilled from the mind of one person, to be handed over to one person. There are no extraneous veils in between the creator and the viewer. Just raw words, at its best, one mind talking to another, perfectly silent, perfectly clear.

And the circuit doesn’t even have to be closed that way for the art to have effect. I don’t even know if anyone but me will ever read these words I’m writing now, but they’re already having the desired effect. Even if I highlighted this whole entry and hit delete right now, what I’ve written has already made a change in me. I’ve taken words and ideas and strung them together, and the exercising of the creative muscle will inform what I write tomorrow, and the day after that.

Maybe I’m wrong after all. Maybe passion isn’t just the thing that you cling to. Maybe it’s the thing that keeps finding you, the thing that’s continually changing and fresh in your mind. Maybe, at forty years old, the time to start thinking that I still don’t know what I want is over. Maybe I *am* master of something. And I’ve proven it to myself here, today.