Convergence

It's a funny thing when events and ideas converge in your life and you watch it unfold but don't quite know what it means. Maybe funny's not the right word, more quirky perhaps.

In the last few weeks, I'd found myself in a slump over my school year, my thesis, my life in general pretty much; though, it's sometimes a useful thing to always return to the basic questions about what you should do with your life. By way of Bob Rae, asking these three questions of Rabbi Hillel I find to be a good starting point:

1) If I am not for myself, then who is for me?
2) If I am only for myself, what am I?
3) If not now, when?

I'm definitely not saying I've answered these questions, but they were definitely on my mind. Then, as our normative decision-making class switched to ethics, we were confronted with a simple basic question, "What does Planning profess?" Needless to say, our entire class were silenced by our lack of...insight.

Then, tonight in the class I TA, we'd invited a local planner for a Q & A on general and local planning issues. One of the students boldly asked, "What is the point of planning if you're so straitjacketed by upper levels of government and such? Defend your job." While some may find the question rude, and others find it pertinent, I found that I could not come up with a straightforward answer for myself (which makes my normative class very handy right now). The planner gave a general technical answer but definitely did not satisfy me philosophically.

So in the back of my head, I once again start on this journey of trying to figure out...why the hell I'm even here, let alone posting about this.