Clay, Moss, Dreams and Failure

This post is inspired by something my friend Edwin wrote the other day.

As far as our jobs go, we have these things in common: We both work at the same university (but in different offices) and we have both been at our current jobs for five years now.
To quote E-Street: “Five years! Good, but also a sobering reminder of the fact that I have to be brave and reject the passivity to settle for what I'm dealt, instead of blazing my own trail. I'm thankful for my job. It's given me priceless experience. Nonetheless, I'm responsible for the course of my life, not the organization that I currently work for.”
And I concur.

I am the poster child for passivity and getting stuck in grooves of my own making. My job is very predictable and I have no doubts of my job security. It’s easy. But moss grows fat on a stone that ain’t rolling.

I have had a number of career ideas roll through my mind in the last five years. I seriously considered enrolling in a nearby community college to get a degree in sculpture and become a “professional” artist.
I have also seriously considered getting a graduate degree in Speech & Hearing Sciences to become a speech therapist or audiologist. I also had a brief stint of seriously considering taking architecture classes at a local community college to see if I’d be interested in that field.

And so it seems that for me to “seriously consider” something means to get really excited about the idea, dream all kinds of big dreams about what it would be like to pursue it, and then freak out about all the ways I could fail, and then fall back into my rut of the same-old things. After which I would use language like “yeah, it would be really cool to…” without having any serious commitment to the idea. Dreams get demoted to shorter day-dreams which then get filed away in the It Would Never Work box.

Ceramics is the artistic medium I am, by far, most passionate about. I feel alive in the studio, creating something from a simple lump of clay. But I haven’t done it in 2 years. Linguistics is fascinating to me – in a way that few other things are. I think it would be incredibly interesting to work in speech pathology or audiology, where the methodical, scientific work meets the personal, one-on-one work with patients.
So why am I still Here and not There?
Fear of failure.

My flakiness is almost embarrassing, and so I hesitate, a lot more now than I used to, to mention my dreams to other people because then I just might have some sense of accountability to step out into the unknown.

A few years ago, Pastor Perry challenged a room of us with this question:
If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?
My heartbeat quickened during the silence that followed.
I felt a new and unexpected twinge of fear and self-consciousness.
I realized I was afraid to answer that question, because it might just mean I’d have to let God roll me out of my rut.