Difficult Decisions

more than a few times this week, people who care for me have said, "maybe you should meditate on that"... so, as many people reading this blog know, i'm leaving my job as a very well paid bureaucrat to follow what i think is a path more in tune with my nature... making a move that i promised myself that i would make when i graduated from yoga teacher training four years ago, namely, to live more from my heart than from my head.

this decision may seem like a fairly easy one, to most, but i have struggled with it, since i have 3 very beautiful and young children. they play a key but complicated part in my decision making process. on the one hand they make the golden shackles of my government job all that much stronger... big paychecks, great health plan, pension... blah blah... but the conflict lay in the fact that i want to live more in tune with my beliefs. what does that mean exactly? i mean i work in health research funding, and as far as i can tell that's probably the best kind of job i could get in the government. i work in an institute that keeps me close to research results and research in general that i am interested in... so what's the problem?

i suppose the biggest problem is that i want to interact and share knowledge with people and i have always loved school. i am passionate about learning and i think that kind of passion from a teacher can be infectious and can make one a good teacher.

bottom line, i think i can be a good teacher and that i can help people.

this blog will be about yoga alot of the time, but since i am starting teacher's college in the fall, it will likely touch on my experience and philosophies around different modes of teaching as well.

returning to my meditations, 2 thoughts keep coming back... the first is Nietzche's eternal return...

[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again...^[12]

Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing", and says that its burden is the "heaviest weight" ("das schwerste Gewicht")^[13]imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life.

this, i have to admit, horrifies me to no end when i think that with my very short existence that i may continue to make the wrong decisions... but the question is, which "wrong decisions" am i most comfortable with? staying the course in a job that is easy but out of tune with my beliefs in a few very critical ways? or would i feel better having risked being happy and possible great at something that seems to be a grand challenge?

which brings me to the idealist perspective... and where i will quote mr Frost, as he is worlds more eloquent than i will ever be.  

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.