“Sustained by intense interest.”

A fragment of text from an op-ed that appeared on my thirty-first birthday has been wandering through my mind for more than a month, searching for a connection:

…a talent — a skill acquired, as intellectual skills are, by years of practice sustained by intense interest.

Last night Mark was telling me about how his boss had suggested he go to grad school, and as the Riesling level sank in the bottle we turned to musing about how much we knew, how much we didn’t know, and how much we knew we didn’t know. 

When I graduated from college, he said, I knew more about engineering than I’ve ever known or ever will know.  Not so much about business and management, I’ve picked that up at work.  But at the same time, I’ve forgotten so much of what I learned as an undergrad.

I thought about it for a minute.  I think my actual knowledge and competency was always monotonically increasing, I said, tracing with my finger in the air a rising graph of knowledge vs. time, from freshman year, all the way through when I finished my PhD. 

I then smiled and traced another graph, this one with a sharp cusp in the middle.  But my perception of my competency and my knowledge took a big dive not too long after I started graduate school.  I never felt that I really knew what I was doing ever again.

Then that wandering fragment of text — sustained by intense interest — connected in my mind and I said:

You know, deep down I think that after I had Oscar, I just didn’t have enough interest in my subject to apply to it the kind of work that would have really helped me excel.  I still have some interest.  I still love science.  I still love applying my mind to problems and thinking hard about them.  But after I had the kids, devoting more time and effort to my studies came at too high a cost.  And my interest in the subject wasn’t enough to overcome that.

This is probably a good thing, because my interest in my children drove me to devote lots of my time and effort to my kids instead.  If I had been more interested in my work — and perhaps a different research problem would have captivated me like this — I might have been motivated to devote more time to my research instead.    And I might have become a better scientist — but, to put it frankly, the way things are I am a better mother instead of a better scientist.

With this I am content.  This is not to say that I might not have been content the other way.  We would be living a different life, though, to be sure.

Sustained by intense interest.  Although I like math a lot, it was the drive to get good grades that sustained me through years of engineering coursework.  But there was always some stuff that I worked hard on purely because it fascinated me.

Like when I first learned about NFP, I read tons of research about it, and corresponded with others about it, and eventually wrote a whole website to introduce others to the idea.  I surveyed dozens of NFP users to find out the real average length of abstinence time is (it’s 12 days, for the record) and collected personal stories to post on my website.

And when I was pregnant with my first child, I read voraciously about childbirth and learned all kinds of things about it and researched the risks and concluded that it would be best to birth at home and then researched what I would do if different emergency situations came up.  I also learned all about newborn bonding, breastfeeding, postpartum health… you name it.  (At the same time, I should note,  I was increasingly irritated with the homework I had to do for my graduate rheology class.  I didn’t get a very good grade, and I didn’t really care.)

And ever since I was about sixteen I’ve been very, very interested in theology.  I could not possibly count how many hours I’ve spent in reading, writing, occasional public speaking, and correspondence about religion in general and Catholic theology in particular.   And I’ve never had a single college class on that subject, unless you count the English elective "Bible As Literature," so grades are most certainly not involved.

And recently I’ve been highly motivated to figure out how best to teach my son to read, so I’ve been plugging lots of hours into organizing the day-to-day work of a reading program (much of the brainwork having already been done  by my friend — also sustained by her intense interest —- who showed me how bad the existing curricula are, and came up with a better way.)

Maybe someday I will figure out how to leverage intense interest in something into a marketable skill.  But for the time being, I am doing something I’ve not until now taken the time for:  enjoying my interests for what they are and for the benefits they bring me in and of themselves.