Dabbling and Settling

That’s right, I’ve decided to open up the blog again. Now each person can stay on top of my deeds and thoughts at his or her own discretion, or use that very same discretion to not read my web page and go get ice cream. Which reminds me, the other day I went to get ice cream at the BDI, which is pretty much the greatest place to get ice cream. The last night before I left for Mexico a year ago, and the first day that I got back to Winnipeg, I went to the BDI. Now I like the BDI and all, but it seems strange that I would have accorded it with such honour more typically reserved for a lover, best friend, or favoured horse. There was an ice cream place in Mexico called Tepoznieves that had very tasty ice cream and a full roster of flavours, including many named after gods and prayers.

I am back in Winnipeg now, in fact I have been for about a month now. Right now I am job hunting and looking for some way to settle down and make an honest living for a while. There is a lot of demand for people who do what I want to do—water & sanitation engineering—so it’s essentially a job hunt in the same way that buying pork chops at the grocery store is a wild boar hunt. However, I love mulling over options and I hate making decisions, so I’m really taking my time and going to a lot of job interviews, looking for something that is pointed in more or less the right direction. In the meantime, I did something smart and made a wise decision.

That decision was to work, here in downtown Winnipeg, at a house that was advertising in the WWOOF book. The house is an experiment in sustainable urban living, in that they are fixing up an abandoned house to be energy efficient, using salvaged or recycled material, and living in it, well, sustainably. “They” is a group of students, although only one is actually using the house as her Master’s thesis, and the others just live there. Now, I live there too. In fact, I work there in exchange for room and board, which is the perfect arrangement for a job hunter. I am working on assorted renovation projects; as an example, today I put rain barrels on the roof of a shed just like people do in Mexico. What the job lacks in the pay scale department, it makes up for in flexibility, and the overall grooviness of living with hippies.

If the term WWOOF in the above paragraph threw you for a loop, it is an acronym for “World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms” or something to that effect. A house downtown isn’t an organic farm, but for some reason it was listed in the book. The mysteries of life.

I got the WWOOF book because I wanted to work on an actual organic farm, and I still plan to, most likely after Folk Fest in early July. Folk Fest is this festival dedicated to folk music that happens every July. I’ve never been, but I won’t let that stop me. The hope is to have figured out where I will work as an engineer by that time, and peg a starting date. Then between now and that start date, there will be a certain, defined time that you might call “the time of dabbling”. During the time of dabbling, I will dabble in one or more very short-term projects before settling down to make an honest living.

In many ways, I am already into the time of dabbling. This job at the eco-friendly house will be about a month. Before that, right after I got back to Canada, I was in Calgary a couple days, then Cranbrook, and then Vancouver, and the other weekend my whole family went to Regina on account of my cousin Lester’s wedding. Future possible plans for the time of dabbling include, working on a farm in Quebec, going to Panama to build a dry toilet and rainwater collection system for my uncle and his family, or going to Italy and having me a butcher’s at the statues and old buildings, and maybe do some WWOOFing there too.

The dilemma is this: I am damn tired of moving around all the time, all breadth of experience and no depth, a spread footing where soil conditions call for an 8” hex pile. However, I would feel like a damn fool for not taking a free trip to Panama, and after I start working none of this will even be an option. Kind of, “now or never”. And by “never” I mean a couple years. What it comes down to is, too much freedom and not enough decisiveness. Because as much as we all love Braveheart, both for the guy who gets an arrow in his ass and for the inspiration of William Wallace and his fight for freedom, too much wide-open freedom can make a guy go nuts.

Maybe what I really mean is that freedom has to be held in check by a set of mostly arbitrary boundary conditions. Some people probably never give much of a thought to their boundary conditions. After graduating from, say, medical school, there would be nothing stopping a guy from being a janitor. It would only be outside his self-imposed boundary conditions, which would most likely have narrowed to cover only some kind of future as a doctor. A lot of these boundary conditions make good sense—for example, limiting oneself to driving straight ahead while crossing a bridge—but a lot of them are purely arbitrary. What’s really stopping you from selling everything and starting a new life in Morocco? When we say freedom, I think what we really mean is being in control and mindful of our boundary conditions.

That’s all to say nothing of the loss of freedom that comes when others choose your boundary conditions for you. And also to say nothing of responsibility, which is probably at the heart of most people’s answer to the Morocco question. For people who live in Morocco, the answer to the Morocco question is pure pragmatics.

So that’s basically where I am, and a gross over-simplification of why I’m having the devil of a time figuring out where to go next.


Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
-Lao-Tzu (from the Tao-te-Ching)

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