Without a Net

Oh, my little brain has been bouncing around like the ball in a freakish, high stakes game of ping pong . My personal movie score changes second by second from the Rocky theme to World on Fire to Greatest Love of All.

OK, so I made up that last bit (Whitney Houston? Please.) but you get the picture. I have a burning question that plagues me. My constant inner dialogue sounds pretty much like this: Follow the money/follow the bliss? Follow the money/follow the bliss? Follow the money/follow the bliss?

On the face if it, such an easy question, but my optimism (glass half full) is usually tempered with an extravagant dose of realism - some might call it "pessimism" or "anxiety" or "vibrating too high". I call it The Glass Half on Fire.

Some dead existentialist once said that perception is reality (So, does he now perceive that he is dead? How do I know the color blue to you is the same as... ) Yoda said, "Do or do not do. There is no try."

Indeed, but platitudes do not shoes on the baby put.

The point I'm trying to make, in my rambling, parenthetical way, is that my entire view of the question of whether to keep the money job or go for the bliss job changes so dramatically and thoroughly depending on which way the wind is blowing. I have my head up my navel, searching the universe for a guarantee that everything will be OK. I've asked my parents what they think, my friends, my dogs, fortune cookies, the In Style horoscope page, random bumper stickers, the set list at Friday's Ani DiFranco show. Surely the omens are out there trying to guide me. Why can't they speak up???

The fact is that there is no guarantee. Clinging to the notion that I can find it somewhere will simply result in my dying the thousand deaths of the proverbial coward. According to Zen, it is this desire to always avoid pain and seek out security that causes suffering. In Zen, it is only by embracing groundlessness, by swimming so far out to sea that you no longer have the reference point of the shore, that you can become awakened.

Really? 'Cuuuz that sounds like it would make me rilly, rilly, uncomfortable.

Perhaps another analogy would be that, in the great trapeze act of life, you have to let go of the one trapeze in order to catch the next one. Otherwise you just hang there, swinging and running of momentum, eventually calling "A little help here?" to an empty circus tent. And no, you don't get a net.

I tell myself that the decision would be easier if I didn't have a child to consider, but maybe that's disingenuous. I'd agonize about it in any case. The real question is this: Is it a better life lesson for him to see his mommy following her dreams and standing up for her convictions, or for him to have a miserable corporate mommy who buys him lots of crap but hates her life?

I gave notice at my corporate gig yesterday.

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PS: On the topic of religion, I give you Eddie Izzard's Church of England.