Proust's Questionnaire: at 40

I just turned 40, a good age to assess where you stand on things.  I also just saw a mention of the recent Vanity Fair article that posed Proust's questionnaire to the gods of our culture. So here goes...

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness? 78 degrees, a cup of coffee, a quiet patio with a view, a cat on my lap, and a book in my hand.
2. What is your greatest fear? Death by fire. Or plane crash.
3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My lack of sustained focus on anything professionally.
4. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Self-righteousness
5. Which living person do you most admire? Hmmm...Let's go with Tina Turner.
6. What is your greatest extravagance? Food
7. What is your current state of mind? Anxious but Determined
8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Ambition - it's the start of perpetual disappointment and dissatisfaction.
9. On what occasion do you lie? When someone has created something or performed something and I don't find it that great.
10. What do you most dislike about your appearance? My newly acquired uneven skin tone.  Fuck you 40!
11. Which living person do you most despise? All living people who attempt to manipulate me to say yes after I've said no.
12. What is the quality you most like in a man? Sincerity
13. What is the quality you most like in a woman? Sincerity
14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? "Furthermore"
15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?  My husband and our cats.
16. When and where were you happiest? California, 2006
17. Which talent would you most like to have? Self-Salesmanship
18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I would focus on a few things rather than allow the immensity of my curiosities to carry me in all directions.
19. What do you consider your greatest achievement? Creating things...art, music, words, businesses.
20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be? I would come back as a beloved family cat.  
21. Where would you most like to live? On a tour bus - or Copenhagen, Denmark.
22. What is your most treasured possession? My car. It means I'm never trapped.
23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Indecision
24. What is your favorite occupation? Ice Road Trucker!
25. What is your most marked characteristic? Social Awkwardness
26. What do you most value in your friends? Humor and Straightforwardness
27. Who are your favorite writers? Crazy women from the 20th Century. Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath. Joan Didion. Edna St. Vincent Millay. And John Steinbeck. And Sherman Alexie.  And Dostoevsky. I could go on.  
28. Who is your hero of fiction? Rhoda Morgenstern.
29. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Right now, all I can think is Frances Perkins.
30. Who are your heroes in real life? Hero is a strong word.  But I like Cate Blanchett for her dignified reserve which belies the depth of her work. I like Shirley Manson for her badassery. I like Tina Turner for kicking all our asses. 
31. What are your favorite names? What's in a name?
32. What is it that you most dislike? Manipulation and greed.
33. What is your greatest regret? Allowing self-doubt to matter.
34. How would you like to die? Old and after falling asleep in my favorite chair while listening to good music.
35. What is your motto? Not sure this is a motto...but I'm a longtime fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Second Fig: "Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!"

Things I Want: This Dresser

The Pressure to be Passionate About Everything

My husband has a lifelong single minded passion for guitars.  He loves everything about them from the sound they make to the way they are constructed.  His endless curiosity about the instrument has lead to a depth of knowledge that is both vast in amount and specific in detail. For example, he can name the favored string brands and gauges of nearly every well-known guitar player and some not so well known players with Rainman like precision.  He also loves to experiment with our guitars and the equipment that goes with them. Not a week goes by when he doesn't change the pickups or rewire the internal components of one of our guitars or bring home a new effects pedal - all in a search for a richer tone or a new sound. It follows that his professional career has included successful stints as a touring and recording musician, a repair shop guitar tech, and an instrument salesman. Simply put, he is a guitar expert, whose combination of love, knowledge and expertise for the instrument has allowed him to succeed in a difficult and ever-changing industry.

I envy my husband because I have never experienced such a single minded love for any one thing.  Sure, I have things that I have a great deal of interest in.  Like my husband, I have a love for music and for the guitar.  But my love is far less all-consuming.  Days will go by when I feel no desire to pick up the instrument - days when I'm sitting on my ass investigating other things that capture my momentary attention and interest.  

Today, I investigated the possibility of learning Danish, which was inspired by my enjoyment of the Danish TV series Rita, currently available on Netflix.  This series interests me because for much of my professional career I have been a teacher with a rebellious streak, much like Rita, the lead character.  In short, my interests connect to each other and almost always swirl around art, music, literature, media, and culture.  But no single interest has ever reached the depth my husband has for guitar. Moreover, I have had many small short term interests that, like Millay's first fig - burned at both ends but didn't last the night.

Even my almost 20-year career in education is not a deep, intensely focused passion. To be sure, I enjoy interacting with my students and engaging them in discussions about literature, writing and thinking; and my varous evaluators have reported that I'm a "talented" and "good" teacher. But talent and competence are not the same as passion; and there is nothing less interesting to me than discussions about education - or theories about how best to deliver content to students. That kind of shit makes my brain bleed. In this sense, I have zero interest in my career and as a result, I will never be a true educational expert regardless of my talent for teaching.  My core lack of interest in the foundations of my current profession makes me feel like a fraud; and, as a result, I have resisted fully committing to the career. I am perpetually looking for something different that will arouse the mystical passion people speak of - or that won't expect such passion at all.

Perhaps none of this would bother me if there wasn't such a cultural premium placed on "passion." But, Americans are obsessed with finding their "one true" passion. Moreover those who ARE lucky enough to find a deep all-consuming passion do seem to succeed at higher levels because they have such a narrow plane of focus. This is perhaps what really bothers me. There is nothing - NOTHING that I love so much that I can imagine developing the intensity of focus or ambition needed for a successful long-term career. I am a jack of many trades and a master of none. In the end, I expect I'll have a lot of little things I did but no great capstone of professional achievement. Because I've been culturally programmed to believe that i should have a "passion" for something, and that my career should circle around that passion and should build toward something great and that only outlier success matters (thanks Malcolm Gladwell), I'm bothered by this.  

Is anyone else bothered by all this pressure to be passionate?