It shocks me that the semester is coming to a close; I feel like so much information has been presented to me in a surprisingly short span of time. Our final assignment for Dr. McCoy’s class is a self-reflective essay, one where we must contemplate what our work means. Why do we read, and what impact (if any) does our work have on the world? We were encouraged to consider these questions over break, and so, I thought about my mother.*
*A quick edit: I just read Toby’s post about the discovery of personal meaning in his work, which I both genuinely enjoyed and see as related to my posed question of motivation.
I began drafting this post over Thanksgiving break, on a Wednesday at midnight. I was on a late train home from an event close to my heart: my mother had a concert with her band. Her relationship with singing has a very long history, and for most of her life, this passion of hers took the backseat. She began singing in bands about 2 years ago, and gets more involved with each passing year. Now it thrills me to see how happy she looks on stage. Although I can’t help but wonder: why does she do it? I only question this because doubt her reasons are purely economic; “librarian by day, JGB singer by night” isn’t exactly the most lucrative occupation. Similarly, I’ve heard a family friend who’s a poet complain about a growing preoccupation with money among her peers. She says this detracts from the work, and it’s simply unrealistic: “nine times out of ten, no one will read it” she said. Joe Moran also briefly covers this issue of economic motive in Interdisciplinarity when he says “[t]he specialized scholar was concerned less with knowledge for its own sake than with climbing the career ladder within an increasingly bureaucratized and professionalized society, with ‘that sunshine of a good name, that constant affirmation of his value and his utility with which his inner distrust, the dregs at the heart of all dependent men and herd animals, have again and again to be overcome” (Moran, 11). Here, Moran references the issues of specialized disciplines. He claims that with specialization comes particular jobs in certain fields, and this consequently adds an economic aspect to the venture of learning. This all rang in my mind when I watched my mother under those colorful lights; although I know she would like to, she isn’t making a huge amount of cash from her shows. Yet there she is anyways, at her happiest on stage. So, if money’s not her motivation, then what is? I then began to question my own motives to work, or in my case, learn.
For some, like the poet, the motive is simply an opportunity to create art. Even if she doesn’t profit at all, she has still created something beautiful. I imagine my mother’s mentality is comparable. I know she’s always enjoyed nurturing the communities close to her heart. She knows the names of every child that comes into her library. When she crossed the venue floor to reach her stage, she stopped at almost every step to say hello to someone. In both these cases, there is something beyond “climbing the career ladder” that pushes someone to do their best and work hard. So I thought about what my version of that might be in my collegiate English studies. The first motive that comes to my mind is that I’d like to be financially secure later in life, on the assumption that college is the most logical way to achieve that. However Moran, my mother and her friend compelled me to consider what there might be beyond that. This issue of my intrinsic motivation is a bit more difficult. To be honest, I have no concrete answer to this question yet beyond “I like to read”. But I’ve gathered that the most important thing is that this greater motive must at least exist. To work for purely external factors is detrimental in every case. For Joe Moran, it leads to a compartmentalization of the disciplines, which his whole book protests. For family friends and my mother, it detracts from the quality of both work and life.
As I mentioned, I’m not quite sure what my motivations for studying English are. But I see this as a fluid thing, something that changes overtime, and certainly not something a first-semester freshman must have solved. I currently stand at the end of the beginning; this has been a semester of ups and downs for me, and a time where I’ve opted to think deeply about a lot of aspects of my life. For this final post, I wanted to finish the way I started: looking back, and looking inward. As I think about this concept of motivations, and contemplate what my own may be, it’s easy to fall into an existential panic. But for now, I’ve at least discovered the importance of not becoming preoccupied with external factors, and can slowly learn what within me will truly motivate my future work.