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Ely, Minnesota -I’ve been working through a book called How to Find the Work You Love by Laurence G. Boldt. It’s a great book, emphasizing the pursuit of a life that integrates work and meaning. He quotes Aristotle: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.” This simple sentence, Boldt says, tells you everything you need to know to find the work you love.

There are some exercises. One of the first is to formulate an orienting question that you can use to help shape your search for meaningful work. This should be a question that gets to the center of your own personal values, the heart of meaning. What are you looking for, really?

I’ve decided to post my Orienting Question(s) and the response I initially wrote (really a further elaboration of the question rather than an answer), because it brings up a lot of the issues I’ve been thinking and writing about lately. It’s a reflection of my own thought processes, an internal debate. It wasn’t really intended for an external audience. But here you go, anyway. Good Luck.

The Orienting Question(s):

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Like I was Saying
In Part One of my State of the World Address, I was talking about how traveling has given me hope. Traveling has contributed to my belief that we, as humanity, may actually survive this mess. My hope is founded upon the observation that the majority of people in the world (about 5/6ths) are basically doing OK and are good people. Somehow, this was news to me. Unexpectedly, while traveling, I was encouraged by the general goodness and well-being of humanity. This general goodness and well-being provides a necessary foundation but not a sufficient condition for hope. The sufficient condition for hope has to with developments in world history that are unique to our time. In my view, the real reason for hope is that the conditions necessary for a global transformation of consciousness are being put into play for the first time in history, courtesy of globalization.

The Noosphere
Globalization is a big word signifying (in part) a whole series of social, economic, cultural, and especially technological developments on a global scale that are making our world smaller and faster. A global infrastructure of systems of information, communication, transportation, and commerce is being put into place, and the velocity of its implementation is increasing. The Internet, mobile phones, satellites, and electronic media are nearly ubiquitous. We are saturating the planet in a web of global interconnectedness. (more…)

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In the next few posts, I am going to consider the impact of my travels (so far) on my own understanding of Life, the Universe and Everything and attempt to make some general observations about how I see the world now that I’ve been around it some. This is my “state of the world” address, The Big Picture as seen by yours truly. But first, as a prelude, and without further ado:

The Top Five Questions I have been asked since returning home from my travels:

What is the most unusual or disgusting food you ate while traveling?
Unusual is probably Guinea Pig (Peru). Most disgusting is definitely the Durian (Malaysia), topping even the “parts” in brown sauce that made me puke for a week (Ecuador).

Does everybody hate us here in the good ol’ USA?
Yes, but mostly they hate George Bush.

What is it like to be home? Any culture shock?
It feels like I never left, mostly. Everything and everybody is more or less exactly the same. But American life as I left it and found it again does seem stranger and sadder than it had before. In a land of such abundance and personal freedom, there is an over-abundance of confusion, fear, and pain.

Which brings me to questions 4 and 5; questions that I will spend the rest of this post (and the next couple posts) attempting to answer.

What have you learned about the world?

How has traveling changed you?

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