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