Taking a Year Off

Before I get into the article, I’d like to give a basic synopsis of what I’ve been up to for the last two months while I wasn’t updating this blog. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can do it any justice. Taking two months of your life and focusing it into a few experiences, stories, or even themes is an uncompromisingly daunting task. I'll see what I can do to, in the words of Kipling, "splash at a 10-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair." We’ve had great times for the holidays, including:

-giant parties hosted by Steve’s work (Project Lazarus) for Halloween, overwhelmingly populated by flamboyant gay men

-Thanksgiving dinner of 11 people at our house, for which we all cooked something and I made the 2 turkeys (one original, one Cajun-style)

-Perhaps more importantly, a Thanksgiving-day football game in the part

-Certainly more importantly, I introduced the house to the traditional Fennellian fare of turkey slop

In general, life has been great and fairly busy. I work a lot, but I’m getting a lot done and I like the people I work with as well as most of the work I do. It looks like my job functions will start to change in about a month, when Virginia finishes at school and becomes a full-time employee and we get one more employee from Australia named Sam. From there I’ll be doing more work, in the most general terms, on building institutional knowledge. In practical terms, I’ll be doing a lot of training (both actual and materials), rebuilding and reformatting the office’s Wiki (which needs about as much work as a gutted home), and coordinating all the volunteers that will start coming in. That’s not all set in stone- like all things at my office, it’s sure to change based on what crises come up here and there. But the idea is that once I don’t have a full load of intake to be doing, I’ll have at least some time to devote to those things.

Apart from work, the home life is pretty good. My housemates and I still get along well, and we’re still making time to do things together even as we each start to have more things to be doing apart from the community as well. I’m starting to form some good relationships with some of my coworkers and one of my neighbors, which is a nice feeling. I’m making time to go to the gym a few times a week in the morning before I go to work. Marecca (from the other community) usually goes with me, which is nice because I don’t have quite enough motivation yet to get up by myself as often as I do because she’s going with me. Steve (also from the other community) and I have been chilling a lot recently too, and we’re starting to teach each other songs on the guitar. Pretty soon we’ll be able to have a pretty sweet jam session. We learned Nelly’s “Just a Dream” last night, which was a ton of fun. Yesterday we had a cookout in the backyard- it was 75 degrees and it was one of the first things that I organized in New Orleans that I felt like was really a success. It was just a perfect day, and everything fell into place like Amanda Pedro putting a puzzle together.

There are still tons of people around New Orleans that invite us to come see them, and we’re not very good at all about keeping in touch with them. It’s something that I wish we would take advantage of more, but since I’m not really the contact for any of the groups, it’s sufficiently inconvenient for me to do so that I usually just don’t bother. But we’ve gotten to hang out with the Duchense sisters, Sister Helen Prejean and the sisters of St Joseph, the Jesuit Residence at Loyola, a zillion different church communities, and about half a dozen service corps (ACE, TFA, CY, Americorps, and a few other religious groups).

In terms of news, I suppose there are a few updates that are worth sharing in case people don’t know, so that you can’t say I never told you:

-My computer is pretty much officially dead. One of my neighbors accidentally decided it was thirsty a few months ago, and it never recovered. Pretty much everything important was backed up on my external hard drive, it just makes it a little harder for me to update the blog and stuff. If I’m at work I’m too busy to do anything else, even if I stay late, so I just need to remember to ask a roommate to borrow a computer to do something like this while everyone else sleeps. I’m still the last to bed and one of the first to get up in the community. Steve says I’m a vampire.

-The van, most recently named the “Lean, Mean, Green, ‘Bama Machine” is also no more. One of my housemates got in an accident a few weeks ago. Everyone’s ok, but the car is definitely totaled. So that’s going to make road tripping a little harder.

-On that note, I’ll be flying home for Christmas. I’m getting into Charlotte on December 21^st, and then Matt and I are coming to Havelock on the 23^rd. I’ll be there til a stupid hour of the morning on the 28^th, when I fly back home to New Orleans out of New Bern.

I know that’s a terribly concise relation of my last two months, but no amount of writing at this point can really do justice to everything that’s gone on. Hopefully I can be better about it from now on. Moving on to the actual entry that I was meaning to write:

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The irony of an article whose title is about taking time off after not updating this for two months and preparing to go home for the holidays is not lost on me. It’s not necessarily intentional, but I suppose that it dovetails rather nicely. I’ll keep it relatively brief, since I’ve already written a lot today.

Most people have no idea what it is that I’m doing this year. It’s kind of a strange place to be, working but being called a “volunteer” and getting paid for what I do by the organization I work for. My coworkers say I’m on a fellowship, which isn’t quite true but close enough that it does a better job of explaining my role than anything else they could say. Among people that do have some familiarity with how my situation works, there are generally two different categories.

The first are the people who just don’t get it. They understand what I’m doing, but don’t understand why. They wonder why I would waste time doing something where I don’t make money, I’m not going to school, and I’m not going to advance.

The second are the people who sort of get it. They understand what I’m doing, and understand that the work is important and valuable to society. They’re excited that I’m doing something good for the less fortunate in society. They say things like “It’s so great of you to take a year off to help people.”

Clearly, these two groups have very different ideas of the importance of social work, and that’s fine. To be expected. Probably even good, to a certain degree, because cynicism is as necessary as idealism if you ever really want to get anything accomplished. I think the important thing to realize that in a very fundamental way, they are both terribly mistaken. Allow me to explain.

The first group of people basically see little value in investing your time, effort, and money (in terms of opportunity costs) in something that won’t help you personally. The second group sees great value in doing that while you’re young and you have a lot of both time and effort. But at some point, both groups agree that in the long run, there are more important life aspirations than to sacrifice everything to help others. For group 1 it’s explicit; for group 2 it’s implied by saying “taking a year off.” What is the year “off” from? It’s taking time away from what really matters, and what really matters to them is what really matters to most people, which is getting a good education so you can get a good job and have a good family life and be comfortable. And that’s a grand ideal. But that’s not what really matters.

For those of us that have read the bible and believe that some parts of it are, if not true, at least good guidance in justice or morality, we must demand more of ourselves and each other. The goal of our lives isn’t to make ourselves comfortable. Many amazing people that either haven’t read it or don’t assign it even that much credibility have reached a similar conclusion. What really matters might in an academic sense be bringing yourself happiness, but there should be no better way of doing that than working to bring God’s kingdom to earth, which can be done by secular means as effectively as (if not more than) by any others. Jesus would not have been remarkably sympathetic to the Invisible Hand argument for social optimization. We have an individual responsibility to actively bring justice to the oppressed. That is not negotiable. What could be a more important goal? What could one possibly value more?

So if you think about it, I’ve been taking the last 22 years of my life off. And if I go on from here to live a normal life, then I’ll be taking the rest of my life off too. I think that most people who “take a year off” have, in reality, only had one real year on. The rest is just sort of a break. Or a distraction. A tangent perhaps. But how can we justify the goal of human existence in terms of the individual struggle to achieve greatness, rather than in terms of the collective struggle to overcome misery? And in the end, coming from where we are right now, is it even possible to achieve one without achieving the other?

So from now on, whenever I hear about “taking time off” to do service, I’ll be asking myself the question “taking time off from what?” And if whatever it is requires you to take time off from it in order to do service, is it really something you should be doing at all?