Intentional Life

"Moments of clarity, attempts to focus, and questions to ponder in an intentional life" -- that was my original proposition for this blog. Intention. To state intentions. To have them in the first place. To live as if I really do believe that the unexamined life is not worth living and to ask the questions a real life contains.

That's me. Easy peasy. Just like breathing. Can't help myself. Always with the asking of the questions. I wonder things like, "If you say 'this smells horrible,' why then would you ask me to smell it? I believe you!"

And I wonder things like, "How on earth am I going to pay for school?"

That is my question du jour. How on earth am I going to pay for school?

Hey.

Wait a second.

This blog has been going for a little over a year and a half. When I started writing here, I said I wanted to go back to school, and I wanted to write (well - and for other people - and for pay somehow), and I wanted my job back at the library.

And now I've taken a class, and my writing has improved, and I am working again at the library - this time in a higher classification! I'm not yet getting paid to write. I suppose a lack of sending writing to people who might buy it could be one cause ... (oh, hush up!), and I'm not in school full time, but somehow, in just a year and a half, a large and obvious part of the original Idea is now Reality.

Well, I'll be blowed! Blowed clean off kilter! While I wasn't looking, things have begun to line up and move forward, just as if I'd meant to do this in the first place!

There is a basic life principle at work here and I am embarrassed not to have seen it sooner. This basic life principle is that we have to keep our eye on the thing toward which we want to go. And its inverse is true. What you keep in sight, you steer toward. I have been looking all this time at school, employment, and writing, and it turns out I have been concurrently (causally?) steering in that direction all along. Huh. Who knew?Okay, fine.

There is a class I want to take in the fall. (Try again.)

There is a class I want to take next quarter. (Try again.)

There is a class I want to take, which starts at the end of next month. (Better.)

It is a three credit class, I could take the whole thing online if I wanted to (I don't want to, but I could). All Marylhurst students have to take this class sometime within the first two quarters of attending the school. It is, therefore, time for me to take it. As LRN150 was to the PLA program, so LAC301 is to attendance at Marylhurst. It's the introductory layout course for the way the whole of the school works. I want to register for this course, and I want to take it this fall. Now. Not later. Now.

And now I've said it. Eye on the prize, and all that. You heard it. You are a witness to this intention of mine. I still don't know how. I need to win a pile of money. Or send off an article to be published. The finances are still a question. But the intention is here. This is a matter of watching the buoys and lights and markers, and knowing what they mean. This is a matter of steering my little craft toward the next point, on the way to the destination. The truth is that we head toward the thing we keep in sight. LAC301. I can see it.