I hope there's a badge for that!

I have to hand it to life. It keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. If I watch the news at all, it is PBS's NewsHour, and of course the political race alone has an "Alice Through the Looking Glass" feel to it. Last night, their report on college students (and other potential employees) starting to use something called "digital badges" caught my attention. What I gather from the report and from some superficial reading on the internet is that these badges are kind of an updated Girl Scout-type badge, but online, evolved in part from gaming -- a digital way for people to communicate personal qualities that aren't readily evident on a resume or college transcript: leadership, empathy, initiative, etc. Part of me actually found this intriguing, even hopeful. I hate resumes and I am afraid that has always been obvious to potential employers (!) Anything that would communicate one's personality more clearly seems like a step forward. But as I watched a young lady demonstrate how a human resource person would navigate these online badges, my heart sunk. There's a moment where, if it didn't happen before (and I think it may have happened many years ago for me), you realize that technology and society have just surged ahead of you and you just have no idea what they are talking about.

This may sound depressing, but for me it is not. In a way, it's helping me stop trying to be part of something I never wanted to be part of. One of the things I realize is that I never really wanted to enter the modern "work world" in the first place. My "career goal" (to be the first woman conductor of the Choir of King's College Cambridge) was over before it started, since there were no women in the field, and really wouldn't be for another thirty years or more. In the mid-1970's, Smith's new Career Development Office had no material applicable to me. I remember my advisor only once asking about my career plans, and by then I was telling people that I hoped to marry an Englishman and have boys who would sing English cathedral music. I would attend rehearsals and services, thereby vicariously experiencing my passion. Perhaps on the side, I would play the organ at a small parish church.

My first resume was typed on a manual typewriter, and contained rather a mish-mash of educational and musical accomplishments, and jobs, both college (dishwashing, cleaning library books) and summer (waitressing and working in my mother's bookstore.) With it and a successful "letters test," I got the first job I applied for, at Time-Life Books' Letters Department. This feels like a million years ago. I spent my non-work hours researching in library reference books where and how to get to England so that I might have a chance to meet that nice English husband. Instead, I found a college where I could actually sing the music myself, but no permanent way to stay over there. As you know, it's been a circuitous journey ever since. A curious one.

Yet the joy of 60 for me has been celebrating that my goals were medieval 40 years ago, and they still are. And it's a back-handed joy, but I appreciate my relative lack of energy and open-mindedness. It's not in me to try to be something I am not. I know exactly what I want, as I've written about before, and it's really only the same dream in an updated guise: to live as a 21st-century "anchoress" in a house within easy walking or public transportation to one or more English cathedrals, or Oxford/Cambridge colleges. I want to attend choral evensong at least twice a week, and sing it once in a while. I want to continue to write this blog, and books about the spiritual path, and if I travel at all, it will be to English historical sites. I'd like an extra room to house other visiting pilgrims. Perhaps on the side, I'll play the organ at a small parish church. Most days it can seem as impossible as it did 40 years ago, but at least I know who I am.

I hope there's a badge for that!