365 days of aRt. DAY SEVENTY-NINE.

taking yourself a step beyond just being you.

Blog about the piece:
I just recently read a book entitled, PLAIN AND SIMPLE: A WOMAN'S JOURNEY TO THE AMISH. I'm not entirely sure I would have picked this book off it's shelf, had I been faced with the choice of choosing it among others. I would have to thank a wise friend whom recycled her inspiration-sort-of books onto me. Inspiration, Self-Help -- same difference, right? It was a few years back; I had recently gotten laid off from a job I had never imagined myself working, but somehow spent my entire undergrad education working towards. And at this moment -- I wanted to change everything. Hence, the need for this friend to clear off her bookshelf in my honor. It took me almost three years to get to where I thought I should be, after dropping everything and starting from scratch. And after all the hard work to get here, I'm still not satisfied. I'm coming back to these feelings -- the need to change, to start over, to rediscover myself and what I want from this life. It seems so masochistic, does it not? This book spoke directly to that sort of masochism, that inward suffering when realizing you're not doing your life's work. Sue Bender wrote, "When I stopped resisting, when I stopped trying to change, when I trusted that there was nothing missing inside, that I didn't have to choose between one part of me over another, I rediscovered me." Bender's story follows an accomplished, urban woman, who plain and simple, held an obsession with the Amish. Objectively it made no sense. It especially made no sense, after having worked so hard at being special and falling in love with the one group of people who valued being ordinary. This book made me realize that while it is important to pursue one's life work, it's even more so important to find a passion for the ordinary. It's like rediscovering the everyday -- being passionate about the simple things. It's a hard lesson to follow. Imagine, finding happiness in cleaning a kitchen, commuting to work, and other daily routines. It's impossible to not feel like all of this routine is just getting in the way of life's work -- but then again, maybe it's all a part of it. Plain and Simple. "Maybe one of these days," Bender says, "I'll be able to give myself a gold star for being ordinary, and maybe one of these days I'll give myself a gold star for being extraordinary -- for persisting. And maybe one day I won't need to have a star at all."