Do what you love

A caveat...what you're about to read is my version of a Jerry Maguire-style occupational manifesto:

Throughout high school, I had stridently planned to pursue my goal of becoming a physician. Most everyone in the family worked in medicine. Why wouldn't I wear a white coat and stethoscope too?

Then, in college, thanks to one miserable biology professor with a Napoleon complex and one erudite art history professor with passion, my interests shifted from anatomy and physiology to oil on canvas and illuminated manuscripts. Why would I continue to labor through biology labs when I felt insatiably hungry for more art history lectures?

As students of the humanities often discover when faced with a viable career path, the question, "what are you going to do with that degree," can inspire diatribes in support of your chosen field of study. By now, I know and can articulate exactly why it is I do this. And while naysayers might question the financial limitations of teaching college art history, I do not ever feel contained by my career.

Teaching art history is the other love of my life (number one being quesadillas...I mean my husband, silly). Though I had to wade through the mucky valleys of career disenchantment to get to this peak of professional satisfaction, teaching is what I was meant to do. Having discovered that at my (increasingly less young) age is one of the greatest blessings I can imagine.

Whether visually walking my students through the Byzantine architectural wonders of Istanbul or attempting to help a student "get" Pollock, everyday I have the opportunity to explore and wonder, to marvel and contemplate.

I watch as students, who have never been to a museum, are dazzled by the light emitted from a Caravaggio. I see their mental cogs turn as they begin to understand that art isn't created in a vacuum, that art is the product of all that ever is and ever was. Art is history, politics, science, and literature. Art is religion and poetry and philosophy. Art is what feeds my mind and delights my soul. P.S. Brevity is not my forte.