Home on the range

Pursuing the quintessential “at home” feeling at your home or by way of a career may well be elusive in this world. At one level you will always feel like you do not fit simply because this world is not really your home. Generations come and generations go. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. Life is short. Houses quickly change hands and new names turn out to be easy to attach to office doors. And yet there is no point trying to make your brief stay on this planet as awkward as possible either.

Horses seem to be at home on the range together with the roaming buffalo and the infamously playful deer and antelope. There are, in fact, a wide variety of creatures that thrive in a pastoral or prairie environment. But not all of them do. Polar bears are few and far between. Penguins appear to have other preferences. Seals like the sea. Mountain goats…well, they tend to stay in the mountains. This is to say that people also feel at home in a wide variety of situations and that it is often possible to find a partial fit.

So, if you had a choice,where would you live? Do you prefer the city of the country? Are you interested in mostly staying close to where you grew up, or would you like to travel? What could you do to eventually make that dream a reality? And what would you really like to do with your life in terms of career? It is possible that at this point you really do not know. How do you suppose you could go about finding out? Where could you get more information in order to determine what you might be interested in? What are you good at? What have you been affirmed for? How could you go about developing your strengths into a marketable career?

These questions could help you determine where you might feel more at home and what you may find yourself doing there. Notice though that nothing has been said here about the importance of relationships when it comes to experiencing the “at home” experience. It takes effort to determine an appropriate career direction, energy to establish a home, and time to nurture meaningful relationships. Singing about the beauty of the range, or whatever setting you happen to enjoy, is somehow much more enjoyable when someone else is there to listen.

Something new

Bryan Adams got his “first real six-string” in the summer of 1969. If he had not purchased that acoustic guitar back then, would you recognize his name now?

When you set out to determine which career is best for you, be prepared to try something new. Music may not interest you, but maybe there is something else that you would like to try if you had the chance. Is inside office work more your thing, or would you rather be working outside in the forest? Experiment with a bit of both and see what you like.

Years ago, while I was working in the woods, I met a man named Dave. And Dave informed me that he was going to buy a canoe in the not-to-distance future, find a mountain lake nearby, and park himself right in the middle of that lake in his nice, new, canoe – just to see if he liked it. That is the idea.

Remember, when it comes to experimenting with career ideas, it is not about success or failure. So you volunteer at a radio station and almost bankrupt the place in the process. Try not to do that, if you can help it; but at the same time, getting fired from a volunteer position could be clue that you are just not cut out for a radio career. Insight and self-understanding is what you are after.

Keep trying. It may take a while to find a general area, let alone a specific occupation, that feels like a fit and something worth pursuing. Aspirations to become a professional blood donor may fall by the wayside after the first four pints flow out of your body. After regaining consciousness, you can always try something new.

The thing not to do is to just jump right into doing what people immediately around you happen to do. This means that you are going to need to be experimenting long before you are in a position where you will have to make a serious and significant career decision. Ideally you will be doing this before you graduate from high school.

Eventually you will likely need to find a college, a place, or some sort of opportunity, where you can develop your career interest into a marketable skill. But do not be too quick to rush off here and there in a frantic quest to find the perfect position or program. Deciding where you really want to go comes first. Deciding how you are going to get there is second.