The Résumé Doesn’t Matter
I’ve been thinking about behavior.
Maybe it started with something I heard at Meeting this weekend about being slow to anger. The message was partly about animals and how uncomplicatedly they can love us. But my mind went somewhere else.
If you want to be loved, love.
If you want people to be kind to you, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
It sounds terribly simple. Maybe too simple. But I keep coming back to the idea that eventually it isn’t what we say about ourselves that matters. It’s how we behave.
Quakers don’t ask each other for résumés before we sit together in worship. We don’t list our accomplishments before standing to speak. At least we shouldn’t have to.
And yet I have a résumé.
I moved myself to New York when I was young and somehow built a life there. I finished my bachelor’s degree and figured out a way to do it for next to nothing. I ran a gallery in Midtown Manhattan and increased its sales. Later, Michael and I had our own business. Michael worked his tail off to help make it succeed.
Then HIV changed our lives.
We closed the business and moved back to Minnesota. Somehow, through that enormous transition, neither of us lost our medical insurance. That may not sound like much today, but at the time it was a feat.
I went back to work.
Eventually I found myself teaching full-time at Minneapolis College. I stayed for more than twenty years. I helped build a department. I earned my graduate degree while working another job to help pay for it.
Woo-hoo.
There. I gave you the résumé.
But none of that is really the point.
A résumé pulls together the pieces of a life. It’s simple Gestalt. You don’t see all the individual pieces anymore. You see the overall shape.
It makes a life look planned.
Mine wasn’t.
There were good decisions and bad ones. Things I worked hard for and things that happened almost by accident. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I screwed up. Sometimes my own behavior probably made things harder than they needed to be.
That’s the life.
And maybe that brings me back to the message I heard at Meeting.
If you want love, love.
If you want kindness, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
Who I am isn’t my résumé.
Behavior tells that story.
In the end, which matters more—the résumé or how you live your life?
“I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head.” —Attributed to El Greco
