I’VE BEEN A PUPPET, A PAUPER, A PIRATE, A POET, A PAWN AND A KING~

You too?

Well, maybe not all of those.  But I’ve picked fruit, run a gas station, sold advertising, flipped burgers, staged events, and managed a trailer park.  I’ve been a schoolteacher, an interior decorator, a psychotherapist, an editor, a book doctor, and I’m currently a hand analyst.

The original plan was to stay in my home town, marry early, and live in a little yellow house with a white picket fence and lots of flowers.  Honestly! I thought this was me.  Lots of us born in the 1950s grew up with this sort of picture in mind.  Few of us have lived that way.  But if you’re like me, you have always had a vague notion in the back of your mind that this was what you were “supposed” to be doing.  At the same time you were having a major career and raising the perfect family, right? And they wonder why women are so confused.

I’ve had three husbands and four weddings. I have three kids and two stepsons.  I’ve moved more times than I can count.  Built a house once.

I make jewelry, sew, paint, collage, cook, garden, and write. I’m a rabid backgammon player. I collect tea sets, costume jewelry, blue and white everything, books, interesting tools, and just about anything sparkly.  My favorite color is shiny. (Around here, we call it Magpie Syndrome.)  I read constantly, and I love movies.

I was raised a Catholic, converted to Judaism, drifted into Anthroposophy.  Underlying all this is the sort of nonconformist paganism some of us country-bred folk develop.

Commitment issues?  Definitely!  My current husband is a very brave man. Fortunately, after fifteen years, he still fascinates me. 

Or maybe I’m just slowing down a bit.

If you’re also a dilettante, or a dabbler, as one commenter called it, you probably have some vague feelings of embarrassment or even outright shame about it.  What have you got to show for yourself?

What you probably have is a wide range of experience and consequently a broader view of what makes a human being.  You are probably more understanding and therefore less judgmental of others’ flaws and foibles.  After all, having so majorly sinned, I’m clearly not the person to throw stones.  And living in this glass house means that there was a sizeable audience for most of it, so I get to hear lots of other people’s stories.  And you know what?  Nobody else really has a road map either.  Some folks think they do—and they are usually the ones who end up most lost of all!

My current work as a hand analyst allows me to see deeply into other people’s souls, and to hear about their lives. Because of my checkered past, I can relate to most of what they tell me, and imagine my way into the rest. I get to show them a new way of looking at their often patchwork lives, seeing the patterns emerge, acknowledging their unseen achievements and struggles.  I help them chronicle their growth, put their failures into perspective, and chart a clearer path.  And I wouldn’t be half so good at it if I hadn’t myself wandered so far from the straight and narrow.  How about you?  What has the Way of the Dilettante given you?

DILETTANTES! YOU ARE LOVED!

I'm a serious person, but I seem to be a serial serious-ist. Are you like this?  I become fascinated with a thing, or a person, or a subject, or a skill, pursue it avidly, then just sort of...lose interest. For a while, anyway.  My friend Carol over at Middle-Aged Diva calls this "squeezing the orange dry." And once there's no more juice, why keep squeezing? Right?

At this point, I change everything, including the metaphor: I dust off my net and find a new butterfly to chase.

Many people find this reprehensible.  They call this sort of person a dilettante. And you can tell by the way they curl their upper lips when they say it that this is Not A Good Thing to be.  If you also have dilettante-ish tendencies, you have undoubtedly encountered this.

For years I believed Them, and I fought this tendency.  After all, I'm a serious person, right?  So I bought the standard view, locked myself into whatever job, or role, or relationship I was enduring, and soldiered on. Until I absolutely couldn't stand it another minute and ran off screaming into the night. Sigh. Another failure-to-commit.

But I'm 60 now, and not much has changed.  I still get fascinated, lose interest, get fascinated by something else.  Sometimes I circle back to earlier baubles of delight and follow the same pattern again, finding that time has wrought change in both of us, so that the old topic holds new interest for me.

And is this such a bad way to be?  Especially if you haven't much choice in how you're put together?  I admire the oxen who can plow the fields unstintingly, turning the earth, useful, dependable, immensely strong. We NEED oxen! The world would fall apart without oxen.

I'm just not one of them.

But butterflies have their function too--cross-pollinating flowers and fruits, bringing color and life-giving variety to the world.  And wouldn't it be a poorer place if there were no butterflies?

So quit apologizing, fellow Dilettantes!  Pursue your passions and ignore the disapprovers. This is a place to share your interests, delight in the bauble-of-the-moment, and know that no one here will judge you.  In fact you might just find that you have seduced some new enthusiasts to the object of your desire.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."
  --Rumi