I’m one of those people who, to an outsider, seem all over the place. Yet on the inside, and to those close to me, there is a way that all my seemingly disparate activities, interests, and academic degrees make sense. They come down to finding a way to make life a little better, a little easier, and a lot more peaceful and enjoyable for those of us fortunate enough to be living it. AMY GALLAND
Part of it is that I like knowing everything in detail – so I dive in. One book on a subject has never been enough for me. I need (and have often gotten) a graduate degree on the next subject I need to know to better under-stand the things I’m currently considering. Going straight to the source is also a hallmark of my pursuits – just taking yoga classes while in graduate school wasn’t enough, I needed to study with Patricia Walden, make a pilgrimmage to learn from BKS Iyengar, and spend two summers moving to the gentle commands of Sri Pattabhi Jois. And that continued …
I felt I was a bit of a frustrated liberal without knowing how to make any of the changes in the world that I thought would help, so I got an MBA figuring (correctly) that I would learn how things worked, how the financial (the old Neiman-Marxist in me resurfaced to remind all that would listen that it is always the economic) underpinnings were affecting this world of arts, culture, service, education, and care in which we were living, and how to talk numbers in order to make myself comprehensible to people who (pulled the purse strings and) didn’t necessarily make decisions based on the same drivers that I did.
Which brought me back to the question of what matters in a life, and how people make lives for themselves. The same questions I asked as an undergraduate philosophy major, a masters student in anthropology, and a doctoral candidate in art history with a minor in folklore and mythology studies.
What matters is the life we live. The way we navigate the systems in which we are interwoven, and finding health, joy, and peace in our daily existence.
And I returned to a job (if you could call it that) that I loved but gave up first for a taste of a life (rock and roll) that was supposed to be fun (it was), glamorous (not really) and creative (daily) and then to use my MBA to create and assist nonprofit organizations to develop, grow, and better serve their missions because something was missing.
To me, for now, the search for what matters is both on the outside – how you function in the world, and on the inside. With all the tools I have to navigate the outside, it became time to turn again to the inside. To work with people not only to help them achieve their missions in the socio-cultural sphere, but also to make their daily lives more liveable. From the inside out. Yoga, Patanjali writes, calms the fluctuations of the mind.
Enabling space. Love. Freedom. Potential. Me. You. Life. AMY GALLAND
