Definitions of Ambition

  So, let's talk about ambition.  Just for fun.  Just for something new.  Just to breathe words into an idea which has never held much of my own air.

Ambition.

I don't talk much about my career on this little keyhole.  I talk about the past.  I talk about the gorgeous uncertainty of the future, sometimes I talk about love, and mostly I talk about beauty or the quest for beauty and the soul-fill of finding beauty where I have felt it lost.  This blog, being a fairly decent reflection of what I find to be my ultimate goal in this wrinkling life, is about beauty.

   And ambition is not often beautiful, is it?  Career goals are not sheathed in flower petals.  They are not soft.  Their edges are harsh, and their veins pump fast, and they do not care about the hammock you used to dream in when life had a very different focus.

Ambition.

I have had an interesting summer.  While I won't go into the nooks and crannies of it here, I have had a summer which has thrown like a fastball the word "ambition" dead at my face.  And this girl, usually so adept at dodging career questions, has been unable to duck.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"  What an easy question.  It is one you sell yourself with in job interviews, and it's really just pretend, anyway, isn't it?  Where do I see myself in five years?  If you have asked me five years ago when my housing was not a house and my job was barely a job and that hammock was the goal of every long, sticky Caribbean day, I am more than certain that I would not have told you that in five years, I would be living a life bright with street lights and busy like a bee hive and falling heavy with the leaden question of, "ambition."

So the five year question doesn't count, isn't real, fades into city air like man hole steam venting from the exhausted underbelly of lives lived on the fast track.

But I have been asked very recently quite a different question.  I work for a movement company.  One that invests in its people, and one that wants from you what it will show you you are capable of.  It is an exciting place to be.  Truly, it is an enviable place to be.  And for me, and for those like me who show their faces slowly like flower-topped munchkins from Oz, it is a terrifying place to be.

  I was speaking with someone who means a great deal to me about this idea.  Ambition.  And he said, "James I don't care if you do not have goals, as long as you are happy."

As long as I'm happy.

But wait a minute.  Hold your quick-kiss tongue and wait a minute because don't you get it? (Side note here-- he does.)  Doesn't anyone get it?  Happiness is the goal.  That's the whole thing.  So what he said doesn't make sense.  It can't make sense.  Because the words he said move backwards, and happiness is not a backwards motion.

It is as bad a habit as nail-biting and white-lie-telling to live only inside one's own understanding of things.  And just as hard to break.  I am guilty of this, to be sure, and walk a constant trek to remedy it.

The whole stark-white truth of it all is that I spent my twenties enveloped in and, indeed, enveloping a life very much outside the normal progression of those absurd years that inhale between 20 and 30.  Ambition was a four letter word.  Ambition was spoken about in whispers and condescension as a neanderlithic concept, abandoned in past lives as futile.  Ambition?  Our ambition is to forget about that world and use our business cards as coasters and bike spoke adornments.  But thank you for asking.

The goal is just to be there.  To be grateful for every moment for exactly whatever the hell it is.  To know that sixty passing seconds are sixty chances to thank the universe for putting clouds in the sky and for the softness of sea glass and for red lipstick with a little black dress.

Everything is perfect.  All of the time.

All the sages of the Caribbean, dressed in sun skin and smelling of salt water have reached the simple nirvana of gratitude.  And THAT is ambition.

Explaining that to a movement population in a movement workplace in a movement city may well be a task I do not have the ability to conquer, and that's ok.  Who am I to judge someone for growing in a straight line, when that is the color of so many aspirations?  And who am I to feel like I need to defend myself for walking in the curves?



And I guess that if you were to ask me where I see myself in five years, this post would be your answer.