Cranky Bodhisattva in a Long Black Dress: How I Got Here, Why I Stay (Pt II)

March 22, 2010 at 5:57 pm (creativity, ethics, memoir, personal, philosophizing, professional development, searching, social justice, Uncategorized)

For those of you who missed it, Part I of this series explains how I became a librarian. Part II delves into why I stay, and took me a little longer to write because, as many a Facebook relationship status asserts, “It’s complicated.”

I mean, I can tell you that it took less than six months to make up my mind about the MLIS, a year and a half to get the degree (clerking and adjuncting most of the while), and the biggest stroke of luck in the universe to start a librarian position at CLP shortly after graduation.  That is a whole separate story unto itself, which we’ll get to…eventually.  All I can tell you right now is that with hard work and a little luck, strange things happen.

And boy, did things ever happen.  My MLIS coursework was hard-core, old-fashioned reference all the way, so of course my first professional job was in readers’ advisory.  Thanks to professional literature, a lifetime of reading both trash and treasure, and a flock of amazing coworkers, I got myself up to speed.  Several years later I moved on to the Reference department, not because I was unhappy, but because around here, the Reference staff are like the Yankees:  legendary for depth and breadth of knowledge.  Who doesn’t want to play for the Yankees? 

Don’t answer that, Dodgers fans.  Just trust  me.  It was a move from good to better, and the last three years have been mostly made of win as I’ve learned from the amazing talent all around me.   I know a lot more about technology now than I did, and I’ve had a front-row seat at the ongoing “future of reference” conversations.  Who could ask for anything more?  

But that doesn’t exactly speak to the question of the reasons why I want to spend my life in public libraries.  I mean, getting a PhD was interesting.  Working in corporate America was interesting.  Librarianship is interesting.  But there’s a lot more to it than that.

My reasons are partially explained by my favorite reference transaction thus far.  It took place on a quiet night while I was in library school.  I’d just been promoted to library assistant, and was thrilled to death to get more time at the first floor reference desk.  A young man in a suit walked up to me with a determined look on his face and said the most amazing sentence I’d ever heard:

I need a book that will change my life.

My eyes lit up like Christmas trees.  “Tell me more,” I urged.  And we got into a 20-minute conversation about the kinds of changes he wanted to make, and the kinds of books that had spoken to him in the past.

It goes without saying that our next stop was a trip into the Bs.  I reassured the patron that the kinds of questions he was asking were the same kinds that people had been asking for thousands of years.  As we walked through the tiers of philosophy, religion and self-help, I pulled various tomes from the shelves and booktalked them, demonstrating how many different answers people had found before, and how many different ways there were to answer those questions.  I varied my stops based on his visible and verbal responses to the books I picked, and we finally stopped in front of a shelf that looked interesting to him based on my description of some of the books on it.

I left him alone to browse and went back downstairs to my post.  About 20 minutes later he came back with a shining face and an armful of books, thanked me, and left.  I never saw him again, and I have no idea if he found what he was looking for.

I swear on a stack of the religious texts of your choice, that really happened.  Yes, Virginia, in this crazy world, where we put up with so much ignorance and unpleasantness on the daily, where we see first-hand the extent to which society and culture often fail the sick, the mentally ill, the poor, and the otherwise disenfranchised…sometimes, we connect on a deeper level.  Sometimes, in our library conversations, we reach past not only our polite, professional facades, but also past all the wounds and challenges in which all of us come wrapped, and touch lightning.

That’s not the only time I’ve ever felt lightning at the reference desk, but it was the first time…and you know what they say about your first time:  you never forget.  On days when ignorance and stupidity pile up like landfill debris, I strive to remember that underneath every question somebody asks me — yes, Virginia, including “Where’s the bathroom?” — there’s a more fundamental question that addresses the root of who we are as human beings.

This brings us to the concept of the bodhisattva, the person who deliberately delays enlightenment until everyone else is enlightened, too. That’s a pretty huge concept to wrap one’s brain around, especially if you are not — as I am not — a Buddhist. And yet, for some reason, it resonates with me, especially as described by respected Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in a Nov. 2006 essay for Shambhala Sun:

[T]aking the bodhisattva vow is a real commitment based on the realization of the suffering and confusion of oneself and others. The only way to break the chain reaction of confusion and pain and to work our way outward into the awakened state of mind is to take responsibility ourselves. If we do not deal with this situation of confusion, if we do not do something about it ourselves, nothing will ever happen. We cannot count on others to do it for us. It is our responsibility, and we have the tremendous power to change the course of the world’s karma. So in taking the bodhisattva vow, we are acknowledging that we are not going to be instigators of further chaos and misery in the world, but we are going to be liberators, bodhisattvas, inspired to work on ourselves as well as with other people.

That passage neatly nails on the head why the reference desk at a public library is the perfect place for me. It is a sad, broken, struggling, complex, hair-pulling world. I am often confused and burdened. Every day people come into the library who are frequently more confused and burdened than I am, to the point that I feel guilty about my own confusion and burdens, even though I know that’s silly, and suffering is not a contest.

But every now and again, bang, pow!

Lightning. And, for a moment, we all see clearly, before darkness and ignorance descend again, as descend they must.

Your mileage, obviously, may vary. I certainly don’t expect everybody to see librarianship through my lenses. It would be an awfully boring world if you did, and it would deny you your own unique path through the profession.

Why did you become a librarian? And, more importantly, why do you stay? If you take up that ponderous gauntlet, do link back for me in a comment.

Next time, thoughts on failure.  Possibly with vampires.