Middle Age Interviews Midlife

If you want to do a round of interviews, here's how:

Leave me a comment saying "interview me." The first five to leave a comment requesting to be participants will be interviewed. I will respond by asking you five questions. You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. (Write your own questions or borrow some) Fun and easy right?

I've jumped in and my interviewer is Lisa.  Amble on over to her journal for her thoughtful and eloquent responses to questions posed to her, and then let me know whether I might interview you. 

Here's my take on the questions Lisa posed to me:

1. You live in a "classic" home in a semi-urban area, yet you seem drawn to the wilderness and nature.  Do you see yourself and your husband "downsizing" after your last child has permanently left the nest?  Where would you choose to live?  

I think that we probably will downsize.  We have good friends who have just decided to stay in their old and large home, and a result have done a lot of decorating that they had postponed for the last decade.  It's possible that we would make that choice -- it would probably be no more expensive to move this house a little closer to our ideal than to start over in a smaller one.  And my husband, having finally settled into his niche at work, is becoming increasingly involved in volunteer activities, so I think that he might like to stay in the area.  I would be fine with that -- leaving my friends would be a monumental crisis -- but I would prefer to move to a smaller place, a more contemporary house with cleaner lines and a fresher look, and I would like it to be on or near some sort of puddle.  Perhaps we will  move into a  smaller house (with one floor and lots of variously shaped windows)out of the city along the lake or next to one of the major parks so that we can have the best of both worlds -- access to city and friends, and nature in our yard and nearby.

2. In your journal, you recently made a fleeting reference to a growing desire to pursue the ministry.  Can you enlarge on that?    

That's been a back-and-forth thing with me for a few years, and one for which I have suddenly begun to receive a lot of unasked-for encouragement, which might or might not be meaningful.  I have concluded that I am not called to parish ministry; I am no administrator and, while I love participating in the life of the church, I love it on my own terms and in the areas I care about -- and there are a lot of areas in which my interest is zilch.  If I went to seminary, it would probably be with the objective of eventually teaching in one -- and I'm feeling a bit aged to be starting a Ph.D.  If I went into ministry, it might be more in the area of pastoral ministry with an emphasis on hospice.  My experiences with my stepmother's death in the past months have taken my back to my hospice volunteering of many years ago and reminded me that I have a certain level of fascination and patience with major life transitions that I should probably be exploring.

3. You have expressed a fascination with cemeteries.  What is the oldest and/or most memorable grave you've ever encountered?  

A current favorite is the one below:     The name on the stone is PAX.  At first, I thought it meant "Peace," but one day as I was out walking I saw some people by the grave and, figuring they were family members, went to thank them for the gift of this monument, which is placed on a  small hillside  so that at times the sun shines through the glass.  It turned out that PAX is the family name, and that the lady who died, the wife and mother of the people I was talking with, loved bonsai trees and making stained glass, and had made this piece herself in the last months of her life.

4. "Eagle-Cam" gave us some insight into your love of birds and birding.  If you were a bird, what kind of bird would you be, and why?     

I would be a gannet, so that I could nest in rocky places in the North Atlantic and spend my life sailing over the ocean.

5. What advice would you have for a young college student who is trying to decide between getting a law degree and becoming a teacher?  Since you have done both these things, we presume you have an opinion…  

How do you feel about conflict?  

Both careers have surprising similarities.  Both lawyers and teachers have  daily opportunties for interaction with people at all kinds of places in their lives, in all kinds of circumstances.  Both careers require you to learn something new at least every few minutes.  Both call upon you to educate others, orally and in writing.  While those demands are obvious in the teaching profession, we often failure to recognize that lawyers are always in the process of educating clients about the law and its impact upon their lives and of educating judges, opposing counsel, and others involved in a case on the merits of their own clients' positions.  And in both professions, the practitioner frequently has the privilege of working to assist people at some of the most trying moments of their lives.  

So the big question is:  how do you feel about conflict? I personally am ok with it, but I much prefer roles that involve cooperation and encouragment to situations where I must skirmish with an adversary.  And there's no doubt in my mind that I am called to educate and try to draw forth the best from people rather than to assail and attack them.  Hostilities do have their place, but I prefer to leave battlefield advocacy to others.

(Walked 3 miles today, which made 16.5 for the week, 37.5 for the month.  I'm way behind, but this has been a pretty intense week.  Vacation starts next Thursday, so I can catch up for the month.)