the ideal life

wow. so i said i would post about once a week. that hasn't happened. i think it is mainly because i have not taken the advice i dished out last time.

nevertheless i've been thinking quite a bit lately about what i would like my life to be like. throughout most of my conscious life i have always debated "what i want to be when i grow up". being the abstract person i am, i have often theorized about how one goes about making such huge decisions and analyzing those decisions i see others making, including my own. anyway, the following ideas that seem to be "out there":

1. do what you're good at
i think that people arrive at this conclusion often and early. i think this does suffice in many cases. an exception to this arises though when one hasn't experimented with different activities or delved into different domains. i used to think photography was relatively pointless and uninteresting, until one time when i was dating amy and she wanted to go out and take random pictures. of course i had to try to impress her, so we went. three years later, i am crazy about photography (though not sure how good i am yet). but if i would have never tried it i wouldn't have ever known. obviously, making some kind of career (part time or full time) is quite another story.

2. do what you're passionate about
similar to #1, except it deemphasizes whatever talent one thinks he/she has, and shifts focus to some external object or people. i have often thought that god communicates a good part of his plan for our lives to us by the dispensing of such passions. i believe this is not a bad approach, unless one is passionate about a new thing every day and throws himself/herself into the wind. i suppose true passions stand the test of time.

3. pray and fast and isolate yourself until god strikes you with lightning
this one is obviously further into the emotional end of the spectrum. i don't personally follow this approach but have seen it many times in the quasi-christian atmosphere i've always lived in. i believe there is some value in it but this doesn't really work out of the context of other approaches and a community of people who care about you, moving in the "withward" direction.

4. minimize the importance of choosing a career/job/whatever
i think we may see this happening increasingly more as the postmodern mindset slowly saturates our culture. pouring all our efforts, thoughts, and money into a specialized life-long career seems to me a very modern and almost ascetic thing to do. i have friends who take this approach to some extent and are relatively content and enjoy life, partly because they are not fixated on, say, climbing some corporate ladder, for example. i suppose this blog post doesn't fit into this category too well...

the main point:
i'm sure there are many more approaches to this subject, but it's getting late. i guess the main point of this one is: i think i have an idea about what i would like to do for the foreseeable future. i would like to score films and/or television. of course this will not be as easy as 1,2,3 to get into. but i have stumbled upon some decent connections and i am possibly going to start working on a portfolio soon. and i think i have arrived at this conclusion with some of the aforementioned approaches (except the lightning part). not that methods are all-important. but my main passion in life, music, also happens to be my strongest talent, and i have always visualized the music i write against the emotional backdrop of a movie, whether hypothetical or an actual one. so there it is (hope my boss isn't reading this, yet anyway).

Labels: career, film scoring, life decisions, music