Working to Preserve
The most Capricorn rising thing about me is that no matter how soulful my interests are, I involve myself with them as problems to solve and do so with essentially an engineering mindset.
Not that I am good at math or something, but rather I don’t believe anything can last without a supportive structure holding it together and solving the problems that add up to it falling apart.
If I’m interested in something, I want it to last. You can tell what interests me by what I am working to preserve.
Sometimes I have to observe and report this to myself because it’s not always top of mind. I frequently have to care overwhelmingly much about things that don’t interest me, and I have to work on those things, too.
The difference can be observed in the output, though. I’m working to make the things that don’t interest me go away. When something I’m doing — even if I’m barely chipping away at it — is in order to sustain something, that’s the thing that has my interest. Sometimes it surprises me.
When I observe, say, a shift in the subject of my writing between Buddhism and Jewishness — a shift that you can observe happening back and forth several times over 15 years, it’s not just recently — I may wonder for some period of time what is happening to me. I may even feel badly about it, like I am wavering in some commitment. But it’s when I step back into this engineering mindset that I see what’s really at stake. The structure was failing to preserve the interest. A new tack is needed.
I write to sustain a project in which I am interested. I am getting better at defining it over time, but when I reach for some overarching description here in the midst of construction, none readily offers itself. But I know it has to do with equipping certain people in certain relations with one another with certain kinds of wisdom that will help us all sustain the project together. That project might very well just be something like “a certain way of life.”
I can tell when it’s getting closer or further away, is the thing. I pursue a certain aspect of the project when I feel the way of life growing closer and stronger and clearer and realer. If it starts to drift away again, I have to scuttle around the structure and start repairing it in a different place, until I feel it coming back to life again.
These days, I feel very deep inside the structure, working on life support systems. And I’ll be honest: I’m still not getting a clear signal.
