Earning A Living with Your Passion: A Letter from Monterey

The other day, I opened my email and discovered a letter from my niece who is a junior at Stanford University this year, spending her spring semester studying biology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, which is one of Stanford’s satellite campuses.

What strikes me most about this letter is how it oozes with passion: passion from my niece for what she is learning, and passion from the professors she is learning from, men and women who are earning a living with their passion.

It is also littered with tremendous insights and observations about Life from one young woman who is growing up.

I also like the fact that this letter demonstrates that passion knows no boundaries. People of all ages recognize passion when they see it, and perhaps more importantly, when they are living it. Sometimes members of different generations are quick to make assumptions about other generations, thinking “those young kids” are so spoiled or “old people don’t understand what it’s like.” The truth is, everyone deep down wants to live a life of passion, no matter their age or life circumstances, and be able to share that passion with people from every generation.

With her permission, I am sharing the bulk of her letter here with my readers. Names have been changed per her request. (Warning: reading this letter may make you want to go back to college, at least for a semester!)

“Hello, friends and family! I’m having a wonderful time boogey boarding, tide pooling, dissecting sharks, watching harbor seals, cooking in my own kitchen, and hopping in and out of my maddeningly erratic shower. I’m enjoying learning about things that have nothing to do with my major. Why? Because they’re cool! And because I’m obsessed with John Steinbeck.

“I came here, in part, because this place is the setting for two of his best novels. But Cannery Row’s namesake boulevard isn’t quite as Steinbeck described it. It’s no longer a factory road, breathing in and out with the tides and the constant rush of sardines. It’s not the same as in Sweet Thursday either; Lee Chong’s Grocery has been turned into a tourist trap. The Palace Flophouse was declared an eyesore and bulldozed. Even the great fishery itself—the one that put Monterey on the map during the first half of the twentieth century—has been gutted and renovated into an aquarium which draws 1.8 million visitors each year. Steinbeck’s sleepy, run-down cast has been largely replaced with fat tourists in colorful t-shirts. But if you know where to find them, there are still characters here.

Take James*, for example. His religion is converse tennis shoes and his motto is ‘don’t get caught.’ After getting a masters degree in Marine Biology and working in several labs here at Hopkins, he discovered his passion and went back to school for library science. Today you can find him in the library anytime before two in the afternoon, when he habitually ditches his job to go hiking. He can talk your ear off with stories only a librarian could love—about lost archives, or what have you—but he’s just as likely to smuggle a bag of rubber bands into your backpack. ‘Start a rubber band fight in the library,’ he will whisper through his bushy gray beard. ‘Just don’t get caught.’

Or LeAnne*, my Animal Physiology professor. You’ll find her in the squat buildings behind the aquarium where enormous circular tanks hold deep sea fishes. She’s world-renowned for her work on tunas, but most of the time this petite middle-aged woman is too busy doing work on tunas to notice how famous she’s become. Her hair has been styled so that it always looks like it’s being blown back by a fierce wind, and even during casual conversations she leans her sinewy neck forward, bracing herself against an imaginary storm. She addresses her six-person class as ‘physiologists,’ and every Tuesday and Thursday in lecture she tells us, ‘You will remember this for the rest of your life. You will never look at a crocodile the same way.’ Her normally unblinking eyes mist over with emotion when she speaks of her dream to someday dissect a lungfish.

Tim* is a tall, kind man with big ears who wears a facial expression somewhere between amusement and bewilderment whenever he lectures us. Each day, before delving into the reproductive cycle of algae or the molecular process of photosynthesis, he describes the origins and life history of a cooking spice to try and convince us that plant biology is relevant to our daily lives. Sometimes instead of answering our questions, he blinks, laughs, and admits total ignorance.

Alan* wears his silver mullet in a ponytail, and his constantly rumpled clothes are explained in his most recent book on Evolution. ‘To me, something about laundry suggests a live-and-let-die philosophy that says all your clothing should be equally hardy vis-à-vis the simplest wash and dry procedures,’ he writes. To him, the ruining of dress shirts during any cycle other than Permanent Press represents a process of ‘laundry selection’ through which ‘a weak and frail article of clothing gets culled from the healthy, roaring pack of your regular stuff and your laundry returns to its original robust state.’

Ken* is the only professor who is cool enough to wear a leather jacket to class. His life’s work focuses on kelp forest gastropods… that is to say, he spends a lot of time scuba diving through great masses of seaweed counting snails. He knows everything there is to know about Monterey Bay’s invertebrates. When asked about the dolphins that we could see from our classroom windows, he commented, ‘They have backbones! How should I know?’ During our first lab he wore waist-high galoshes as we collected specimens from the intertidal zone, and recollections of Cannery Row’s Doc crashed over me like the waves of the incoming tide.

They may not be here in the flesh these days, but Steinbeck’s characters are still alive and well. There’s a vacant lot I walk past every day on my way to class, and I half-expect Mack and the boys to loiter there when I’m not looking. The apartment Kate shares with her four cats is almost as small as a boiler, but it is big enough for dreams of biking across the USA and illustrating children’s books. Alice Ann adopts every new girl in the area as her own daughter. And Chris, dressed as an Amish bounty hunter, patrols the Hopkins grounds and seems like the kind of friend who would break your arm if he thought it would help you get back on your feet. The list could go on.

I’m learning a lot here. Some of it has to do with my classes (tracheophytes, endophiles, mitochondria) but a lot of it doesn’t. Mostly, I am learning how to listen to people, instead of filtering out information that I don’t immediately see as important. How long has it been since someone looked you square in the face and really listened? I’ve been blessed all my life with friends and family who value what I have to say, but I’m afraid this may be the exception, not the rule. Monterey can’t possibly be the only city in California where quirky, delightful people live. I must have just started noticing.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Sweet Thursday. “There don’t nobody listen, and it’s so easy! You don’t have to do nothing when you listen,” Fauna tells young Suzy before her date with Doc. “If you do listen it’s pretty interesting. If a guy says something that pricks up your interest, why, don’t hide it from him. Kind of try to wonder what he’s thinking instead of how you’re going to answer him back… S’pose Doc says something and you don’t know what it means. Ask him! The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.”

Pretty amazing, wouldn’t you say? To discover so much about yourself while studying snails and dissecting sharks. It makes me believe even more adamantly that in order to grow and become better at what we do, it is imperative that we get outside of our normal routines and take some time to observe, reflect, and listen. And, of course, follow our passion!

Indeed. Passion and Listening. Two of the cornerstones of living an authentic life.

If you like what you read, leave me a comment and please spread the word on Twitter and Facebook!

Onward!