Even when business isn't ideal, I love the fact that my dad's jewelry store is usually involved in happy situations. You buy jewelry to mark special occasions, celebrate, honor, surprise, treat yourself or someone else--and the end result is something pretty and positive. Not a duty, a burden, a necessity, but something lovely that enhances your literal view and your figurative mindset. His store, while the back rooms are full of piles of paper that border on "Hoarders", is full of the shiny, the glittery and the fancy. His customers have long personal business histories with him, and he may do engagement rings for multiple generations, and remake a great-grandmother's prized necklace for a high-school graduate. They send thank-you cards and call to share happy proposal stories, and his jewelry plays a minor role in so many lovely times in people's lives. He gets to play with pretty things, and make people happy. Does it get much better than that?
My love for fashion and jewelry and building relationships with people, which I remember every time I go down to his store when I'm in Pittsburgh, leads me back to the recurring conversation I've been having with friends lately. Not to be cliche or dramatic, but plenty of us are in that typical "quarter-life crisis", where, in our early/mid-twenties, we're dissatisfied being entry-level, dreaming dreams of bigger or better or farther away, and/or having a hard time pinpointing just exactly what we should be doing.
New goal? Focus on two main questions.
1) What makes me happy?
2) What am I good at?
Ultimately, I'm seeking the ideal intersection:
What can I do that I am good at that also makes me happy?
(Yes, I'm idealistic enough to believe my work should make me happy, not just provide the means for my existence. No, I'm not currently interested in your argument that I should find a 9-5 that supports me in just doing things I actually love in my free time. But thank you, and best of luck with that in your own life, it just won't cut it for me.)
This currently results in lots of mental or physical post-it notes full of pros, cons, top 5s, lists of things I loathe and detest, cities, classes, things to learn, things I know I'm terrible at, and things I hope other people think I'm good at. No guarantees that I'll figure out anything any time soon, and while I trawl craigslist (JOBS, people, the adult services sections have been shut down....), keeping up hope I'll spot something that hits a nerve, I want to know that I'm not just settling. That I'll find the best way to play with the pretty things, in one way or another.
