Trying to Live a Life to be Proud Of

I am leaving my job a week from today. I have no current backup plan. Nothing has yet panned out. I am still interviewing and looking for a gig that will get me into the urban planning/affordable housing field. Eight days from now, I may potentially be unemployed. Am I afraid? Am I nervous? Am I crazy? Kinda. Sorta. Absolutely.

I am an avid planner but I am learning that no matter what you plan or how you plan or how effective your plan is sometimes shit just doesn’t work out. It is that simple. I just gotta do my best, follow my heart, and live a life that I can be proud of. I have to take chances.

I am reading this dope book, NO MORE PRISONS, by William Upski Wimsatt. It is thought-provoking, engaging, and challenging. Here is an appropriate snippet…

“I look at my friends who graduated college. Most of them are paying off debts now, riding the conveyor belt into graduate school, and selecting their mates from unnecessarily narrow pools. They are mid-life crises waiting to happen. Or maybe they won’t even have mid-life crises. Maybe they’ll just get stuck. Geniuses at following directions, they have little direction of their own. They’re good at fitting into structure but they have little idea how to change the big picture. Some of them feel their narrow field is the big picture. They have no idea whether they’d be happier doing something else.

I prefer to have my mid-life crises now—early and often. I quit college in the middle of my Junior year and enrolled as a student at the The University of Planet Earth, the world’s oldest and largest educational institution. It has billions of professors, tens of millions of books, and unlimited course offerings. Tuition is free. There are no degrees and no one ever graduates.

Students pose their own questions and design their own curriculum.
Here is my question:
How can I commit the most good and the least evil in my lifetime?
Here is my curriculum:
“Live in a different play every year: D.C., Oakland, New York, L.A., a farm, and somewhere in the South. Play a different sport every day of the week, preferably with a different ethnic group: Basketball with blacks, martial arts with Chinese, capoeira with Brazilians, soccer with some of everyone, tennis with WASPs, etc. Every Sunday attend a different place of worship. Every day get to know someone new. Volunteer, attend lectures, talk to strangers on the street. Seek out hundreds of role models and mentors. The rest of the time, go to the library, read whatever I want, take notes and make charts. Create my own personal bible, almanac and telephone book. For discipline, live in high-crime neighborhoods. That ought to keep a gun to my head. Save up enough to travel to a different continent each year; otherwise, work as little as possible. Do that for five years. That will be my freshman survey course. Then I’ll have a better idea of what to do as a sophomore.”