Over the weekend, I visited Clay Coyote, a pottery studio and gallery out in the central Minnesota farm country between Dassel and Hutchinson, right in the middle of fields and meadows. The proprietors are in their second major career, having left Bakers Square corporation in the 90's to build this business. They work maybe 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and they seem very pleased with the variety and richness of their lives: buying art from 150 artists for the gallery, making functional pots in quantity, and maintaining interesting relationships with community groups in the area.
I was juxtaposing this interview in my mind with some interviews I did recently with mid-career and late career scholars from different disciplines. It is valuable to see how the adult life-cycle is emerging for humans in the 21st Century, among courageous and intellectually alive people. For the folks at Clay Coyote, their Bakers Square experience was an incubation stage, a safe place to acquire skills, build up capital, and figure out what they really wanted. It made sense as a limited part of a life that eventually became much larger. I find something similar with scholars: at the beginning of their careers, solving the puzzles in the literature, the joy of winning -- are enough to keep them going. Later on, they come to see their work more and more as part of large, ongoing political and moral dialogue.
Almost any stage of human life pretends to be: life entire. And I expect that almost any stage is tolerable if one can see through that pretense.
Posted by shea0017 at October 18, 2004 9:53 AM