Today I am Writing: On Multiplying

My friend and I sat in the window of our local Japanese restaurant yesterday, noshing on ramen and the realities of an academic year, come to an end.

Her time here at our University is over, her appointment up. In a few short weeks she leaves us, to go elsewhere for a teaching fellowship, where she will continue her writing her reading her thinking in a space provided for her, while engaging art students on special occasions with critical thought. It is a perfect gig for her, but only lasts a semester.

She is tired (I can see this in her lines) of the academic game of hopping from appointment to appointment, fellowship to fellowship, as lovely as each might be. "I just want a job!" she tells me.

She tells me that if there is no job after this one, then she is calling her academic drive done. "What has all this work been for," she asks me, "if no one will give me a job to show for it?" And I look at her, and I look at what I know of her, and I see lines and lines and webs and webs of impact, made out of that work and her investment in those she has encountered in it.

I say: You've been Multiplying. That's what the work is for.

I hear all this, out of my own purview of my appointment is complete in a year, and what then will I do? Will we all agree that we should renew, or will I move on, to what's next? And if I do, move on to what's next, what next is there to do? (I am tired, too.)

I look at my own life, the things left undone, like the book I want to write (if I only knew what it was really about) and the things I want to know so that I can go out and tell the world, and the music I want to make out of the depths of my deepest soul. I think of all the things I thought I'd do and all the things I wanted to be. I think of how I really thought that all of those things would be wrapped up tight, inside a "job," one that made sense and said: This is who she is.

But then I think of all the ones I've gathered into my office and talked with, listened, prayed. I think of the partnerships across this place and the seeds sown and the still growing things. I think of the notes written from the leaving ones, saying that they are better because they knew me, and the gifts on my table to recognize I cared. I think of the piano babes who curl in my chairs and commandeer my home as if it were theirs.

And it changes me. It centers me. It says to me it doesn't so much matter what I do, as long as I am there. To plant my seeds, to Multiply.