Culture

I just finished reading a great book, "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks. For those of you who haven't read any of his Culture books I highly recommend them - and this one in particular. It's been interesting to contemplate how life would be if there was no danger, if there were no rules, if death wasn't a lingering threat. What is added to our lives by our mortality? What do we gain? When I was an earnest (ahem) young girl, I remember swearing to my skeptical third grade teacher that, were the future to provide me with a choice, I would opt to do the housework myself rather than letting a robot take care of it for me. I felt then that I would lose some essential aspect of living by relinquishing any part of my existence. Nowadays, I would jump at the chance to have something scrub my toilet, iron my clothes and wash the dishes. But how far would I want to take that? How would it be to live in a society in which there was no need to work unless one was inspired to do so, a society which also has a lack of need? Want to live in a grand house over looking a fjord? No problem. How about a houseboat floating in a sea of jello? No problem - until you find yourself living there, surrounded by jello.

At this point in time, life in the Culture sounds pretty appealing. I would love to have the luxury to immerse myself in various pursuits without the pressures of time/mortality and money. I would learn all about linguistics so that I could better understand the formation of accents and dialects. I would open my own restaurant and try being a chef for a while. I would spend a few hundred years, because that is how long it would take, learning how to draw a decent representation of the world around me. And I would study the fishes in the deep blue sea.

In some ways a PhD does afford this sort of luxuriating. I am getting paid to spend three (and a half) years studying something that I find fascinating. The down-side is that this is just one thing I'm fascinated in - one of many, many things. Some people hear their calling loud and clear; for others there is no calling, just a mumbled cacophony of interesting things to do.

Which brings me to another point that's been making lazy laps around my cranium. I have been asking myself recently if fish/ecology/biology/science is really it for me. Maybe I won't enjoy it as much as I would enjoy owning a specialty organic farm? What I have come to realize is that there can be relief in just making a choice. It doesn't have to be the right choice (is there ever an obvious Right Choice?), it just has to be a choice. And once the decision is made, you can be on the move towards something. Perhaps the particular something doesn't even matter as much as the having chosen it. And so I find myself on the bring of beginning a dissertation in marine ecology...

Which isn't to say that I won't try cooking commercially at some point, or that I won't live on a farm again or - well, ok, so the linguistics thing is probably out.