Looking Both Ways

Sometimes it is so clear that you are crossing a one way street - all the cars will be coming from one direction only - yet you stop and look both ways.

I look both ways often - into my brain and into my heart - when I know for a fact that I need to look only at one direction. For career choices I need to look hard into my brain - yet my heart often goes in the way.
For a long time I have known I love writing (I will always be the first to admit my sin of not writing enough), and I have known that I long to teach since I was 7.  My brain has guided me all along to my current job, but at the end my heart says the job just isn't enough.

I'll tell you what my day is like: in between classes to teach, students' projects to supervise, an academic journal to manage, my own research projects and the required volunteering/civil service, I am forced to mingle with colleagues whose company I don't enjoy. My brain will tell me to toughen up: they're called "colleagues" and not "friends" for a reason. But my heart tells me daily that since I spend most of my days in their company, one day I will wither. The price to pay seems too high - I am constantly stressed out about being in the same room with so many of the most boring, petty, old-fashioned people ever.

Something needs to be done, says my heart. My brain says nothing other than 'toughen up', for it knows I need to be here for another 5 years. It tells me that it's a one way street: there is no way I could get off it but to go with the flow. My heart however - it knows that I may wither - and suggests that I start my other longing: writing. Not academic writing though. No, that one is always done because I have to. The writing my heart suggests me to do is the type I've loved since childhood, but find no time to do: the writing about absolutely nothing, and everything.

After looking both ways I messaged a dear friend who also aspires to write, and made a pact with her to write four posts in our blogs this month. Doesn't look like much, I guess, but hey, it's a start.


Already I feel good about this pact, and its potential to get me writing again. I guess it pays to always look both ways, even if in your deepest heart you know you are on a one-way street.