What is my Job?

I've been thinking a lot these days about jobs. I currently have one, thankfully, but I'm looking for another one, and trying to figure out what kind of job I want. I find the most difficult aspect of this is sifting through and reconciling "The Way Life Is Supposed To Go" with "What I Want." These two things, I'm realizing, may not overlap so much. Twenty-eight years of subtle and explicit cultural and societal messages about ambition, success, career, education, etc. have become a mountain atop the latter, which I am now trying to unearth, slowly but surely.

I read something today that helps. It's by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Buddhist teacher who wrote the book Wherever You Go, There You Are. I read one short chapter every morning before meditating. It is an excellent and accessible guide to meditation and mindful living. The passage I read this morning is called, "What is My Job on the Planet with a Capital J?" I want to share a small part of it:

Rarely do we question and then contemplate with determination what our hearts are calling us to do and to be. I like to frame such efforts in question form: "What is my job on the planet with a capital J?", or, "What do I care about so much that I would pay to do it?" If I ask such a question and I don't come up with an answer, other than, "I don't know," then I just keep asking the question. If you start reflecting on such questions when you're in your twenties, by the time you are thirty-five or forty, or fifty or sixty, the inquiry itself may have led you a few places that you would not have gone had you merely followed mainstream conventions, or your parents' expectations for you, or even worse, your own unexamined self-limiting beliefs and expectations.

...[Asking this question] may not mean that you will change what you do, but it may mean that you may want to change how you see it or hold it, and perhaps how you do it. Once the universe is your employer, very interesting things start to happen, even if someone else is cutting your paycheck.

Kabat-Zinn also talks about Buckminster Fuller in this chapter, and about how, from the depths of depression, Fuller decided to live his life from then on as if he were an employee of the universe, basing his actions on the question, "What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?" He says that Fuller also liked to point out that, for the honey bee, it's all about the honey, but in its pursuit of honey, it becomes nature's (or the universe's) pollinator.*

It's still not easy to figure out whether I want to be a farmer, a baker, a social worker, or something else entirely, but it's reassuring to know that no matter what job I find myself doing, if I approach it right, it will be my Job.

*from Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are. New York: Hyperion, 1994.

"Going Veg" in Argentina

One night over dinner at the Hare Krishna farm, I was talking with one of the nuns, Jai Radhi, a mature and fun-loving 17 year-old, about vegetarianism. I think the conversation began when I asked how they make the delicious, fluffy cake we had eaten the night before for a birthday celebration, without eggs. Hare Krishna don´t eat eggs, according to Jai Radhi, because its part of the menstrual cycle of the animal. Somehow this evolved into a recounting of my experience helping to kill thirty chickens last summer at a friend´s farm in Vermont. By the time I noticed the look of horror on her face, and on the faces of the two or three other devotees in the dining room, listening in, it was too late. "Sarah, you´re a criminal!" she exclaimed, not at all swayed by my argument of, "No, but it's better to come to terms with the killing of the animal than to buy a styrofoam package in the supermarket," etc. The nuns eventually forgave me (I think), but for the remainder of my stay, Jai Radhi greeted me (in English) with "Sara, Go Veg!" which always made me laugh.

I had no intention of "going veg" back then. I was willing to forgo meat during my stay at Eco Yoga Park, but this is Argentina, after all. People eat more meat here than in any country in the world. Nearly every Argentine male I've met has said he eats meat every day (and here, "carne" or meat, means beef), and often, twice a day. I'd be crazy to become a vegetarian in Argentina...right?

Well I've been here three and half months now. I don't eat steak every day; in fact, on the farm, we don't eat any meat, but a steak dinner at A Punto, a great steakhouse (or "meat restaurant," as I call it) is a favorite Saturday night ritual. Let's just say I've eaten my share of great steak since I've been here, not to mention chorizo, salchicha, morcilla (blood sausage), conejo (rabbit), cordero (lamb), and ham.

At the same time, however, I've been listening to the audio version of book that's made it more and more difficult for me to square my carnivorous ways with the reality of meat production. It's called The End of Food and it's about the industrial food system, both in the United States and abroad, and its various and major negative impacts on everything from human health, the environment, and the economies of developing nations.

There are a number of compelling facts in the book that have made me rethink my meat-eating ways. I'd say I'd spare you the details, but I'm pretty convinced that these things are important to know, whether you eat meat or night. One of them is the fact that a single hamburger patty contains meat from an average of fifty different cows, and can have meat from as many as 1,000 cows. This was given as part of the chapter about food-borne illness, and the near-impossibility of tracing the source of an outbreak of e. coli, and it made my stomach turn.

The second fact that I learned, which I'm sure I've heard before, but which really hit home this time, is that beef is incredibly inefficient to produce. It takes 20 lbs. of grain to produce one lb. of beef, versus around 5-7 lb. grain for the same amount of pork and even less for chicken. Like I said, I know I've learned about this before, and even tried out being a vegetarian for a year in college. But, as Jonathan Safran Foer explained more eloquently than I can in this article in the Times Magazine a few months ago, it's easy to "forget" what you don't really want to know, and so I did.

So I've decided to go partially veg, for now. I'm going to stop eating beef, even though I'm in Argentina, the land of beef. I know it sounds crazy, and, some may say, impossible. But I think it can be done; in fact, I've even met some full-on (albeit foreign) vegetarians here, and have eaten in some lovely vegetarian restaurants. Like I said earlier, I've had my share of delicious steaks since I've been here. I've done it, but I don't need to keep doing it. For now, I'll keep eating pork and chicken, placating my conscience with that fact about them being much more efficient, and selectively forgetting all of the reasons why maybe I shouldn't be eating them, either. Maybe when I get back to the States, I'll take Jai Radhi's advice and fully "go veg."