It can't always be new and exciting

I have revisited my study of personality types lately, spurred by several insightful e-mails from my mom. Although some of this stuff I take with a grain of salt, for the most part the myers-briggs classifications make a lot of sense to me and help me understand what makes me and others tick.

I am an ENTP - extroverted, intuitive, thinking, perceiving - the visionary of the 16 types. One of the main ENTP traits is the desire to always seek out new people, places, and things. I thrive on the challenge of having to adapt to a completely new situation. I actually need this constant innovation and change to be present for me to be able to do my best work. (That is one of the reasons I like fundraising so much. I am constantly stimulated by new projects and proposals, and get the added bonus of being able to write for a living.)

However, what constitutes a strength of my personality type - being an innovator, thriving on change, constantly seeking out new and interesting opportunties - can also be my downfall. Life becomes tough when the thingsI love begin to stagnate. For me it is so easy just to go on to the next thing – because that is what I am good at and that newness and challenge is what ultimately drives me – but I am also aware that in the process I can leave things unfinished or miss out on a lot of wonderful things that come from routines, practices, sameness.

Things here are beginning to stagnate, and it is sometimes hard for me to realize that this doesn’t mean that they are not good anymore. Life in Chimoio can be maddeningly slow and monotonous. It is hard to live and work with the same people day in and day out and not grow tired, much less in a place like I am in now where there is literally nothing to do. I fought extreme boredom all day, one of the problems with finding a "home" and settling into a routine. I am still having a great time, but the newness of my work, my surroundings, my relationship, is all beginning to wear off. Real life, with all its glories and problems, is setting in.

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So, on that note, the dialogue about home continues. More below from Jenna, and thanks to those of you who contributed to the discussion on the last guest entry...

"I have recently been inundated by encounters with peers on the same oxymoronic pseudo-career track as I. We are well-educated in a system that we have only academic interest in pursuing. We are pulled to the ends of the earth only to discover universal loves that we already know. We travel far and wide before we can miss a thing that we never wanted to call home. In our brains we have always known that there is something pure and lovely about a life lived among beloved others, and witnessing true communities in the world strike us in the gut with a nostalgia for something we have never had.
What is it about a discussion of home that evokes such aimless pangs in the hearts of the members of my generation? How does a collection of such independent, worldly characters get wispy-voiced and wide-eyed at the thought of stable community? We are at an impasse in the development of our personae: each solo jaunt into the experiential world leads us to draw the conclusion that the ideal context is one of group solidarity, communal living, a stable geography with a constant awareness of the goings-on of the world at large. The impasse, then, is whether to proceed to the next solitary sojourn, continue to develop one's individual conception of Whatever, with this imagined settled community always in the distant, unreachable (impossible) future… or, rather, to seek deliberately a planned community, find this point of stability, and (impossibly) abandon one's individual wanderings as soon as the sought community exists.
The trouble a young sojourner/expatriate encounters is exactly this:
the necessarily self-centered nature of the journeys taken by a twentysomething individualist prevents her from following her intellect in the direction her journeys seem to be pointing.
I am reminded of a decision I made at age sixteen, months before embarking on my first journey abroad. As a teenager, I lamented the boring, sheltered, suburban lifestyle to which I had not so much submitted myself as failed to seek an alternative. I imagined that a greater risk-taker than myself would have found a way to have Something Happen in his or her life, and I vowed to Experience. In great and youthful rashness, I determined to teach myself the value of the negative experience through empirical contrast with the positive; I told myself that only through experience could I learn true personal meaning, make real educated decisions, and break out of the enclosed bubble of mediocrity I had thus far occupied. And I succeeded in being rash and impetuous, experiencing the consequences in their myriad forms. As time went on, I began to see an error in my plan, for my experiment was making its own decisions, and I perceived an abandonment of willpower, a loss of control. It was then that I began to recognize the ignorant wisdom of my initial caution, and I returned to the beginning, proceeding with moderation once again. I consoled the overeager extremist that dwelt within me: her loss of power, I reasoned, was for the good of the whole. After all, was not the initial purpose of living these extremes to accumulate a spectrum of experience by which to assess life decisions, allowing me to depend on a real, empirical evaluation rather than a theory whose primary basis was fear? …And yet, the retreat of the crazed, spontaneous self that had been able to guide my fun and excitement left me despondent and introverted, and even the distress of the most negative of my outrageous times paled in comparison to this drawn-out life of quiet desperation. In short, I was no longer suited for mediocrity, now that I knew what mediocrity really was.
The life experiments of a bourgeois member of the educated elite are not scientific. We do not maintain one Self in a vacuum as a control, to which we can revert if the test goes awry. Our personalities may be in flux, but each love creates a new heartstring; each scar marks us indelibly.
If we pursue a rootless journey for long enough, will we never find peace in a settled existence? If we spend too much time seeking the ideal community lifestyle, will we be inadvertently creating ourselves as unstable individuals, unable to live it? Or is my inability to follow my own advice simply demonstrating my lack of self-control once again?"