Ponder The Journey

We are aware of how fortunate we are, across the ranks of Raxa Collective, to be doing what we want, where we want, how we want. That is an exceptional privilege. Not everyone gets to the opportunity to choose their work. Not everyone has the luck to pursue a mission. But our privilege does not stop us from promoting some basic tenets that drive us. One of them is: if you can, when you can, chase the higher calling.

The author of “Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World” (Penguin Press, click above to go to the author’s website) provides an op-ed short essay that provides useful bearings for the first Monday of a new year:

A Job That Nourishes the Soul, if Not the Wallet

By LEIGH ANN HENION

The lawyer was in his mid-20s. He narrowed his eyes, peered at me from behind his cluttered desk and said, “So, why are you quitting?”

It was 2000, and I’d been working as a receptionist at his corporate law office, a satellite of a larger, urban firm, for just a few months. Our building was in a small, Southern downtown laden with Spanish moss. Unlike other local lawyers, my boss didn’t favor seersuckers. He often came in with his heavy suit jacket hung over his arm, and I could make out concert T-shirts through his pressed, white button-ups. He unwittingly revealed his music preferences through the tiny dancing logo of the Dave Matthews Band and the emblems of Hootie and the Blowfish.

The receptionist gig was my first out of college. I’d attended a state school, and I’d graduated aimless, with no professional connections and a self-designed major that incorporated courses with names like African Dance and the History of Women in Southeast Asia. Since high school, I’d been working at small-town restaurants — in waitstaff jobs that involved clogged sinks, deep-fat fryers and sweet-tea dispensers in my home county, one of the poorest in North Carolina.

My job at the law firm was the first that my ambitious parents — both first-generation college graduates — had ever been truly proud to hear about.

It was also, by far, the worst I’d ever had.

“I’m leaving because this isn’t how I want to spend my days,” I told him. “This isn’t what I want to do.”…

Read the whole essay here.