An Eventual Hobbit?

"An eventual hobbit?" you ask. "As in... you aspire to eventually be a hobbit?"

"Careful!" I hiss. "You just split an infinitive."

You stare back at me blankly.

"I mean, uh, my parents said I could be anything I wanted when I grew up. And lately, I've just really been feeling the hobbit thing."

.....

The first time I read The Hobbit I was in fourth grade, and it would be more correct of me to say that my step-mom read it to me. Regardless, though, I was totally transfixed, not necessarily by Bilbo Baggins but by the entire world he inhabited. Never mind that I had a little patch of woodland dividing my apartment complex from the next one that I could go tromping through. I wanted to live in Bilbo's world, growing up in the Shire and then making my very un-hobbit-like way into the great adventure beyond. And I wanted that adventure to be filled with Tom Bombadills and Elronds and Gandalfs. So I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then I read it again, and then again. It's the only set of books I've picked up more than once, and I've done that though I couldn't care less about the ring or Sauron or the fight against evil. I read it for journey and for the fantastical world that the journey takes us through.

My current trajectory doesn't have me heading someplace that Bilbo Baggins would fancy. Which I suppose begs the question of what my current trajectory is. I mentioned in my last post that I'm a grad student. I'm starting my third year of a four to five year PhD program in inorganic chemistry at a program ranked in the top five in country for that field. The major metric by which my success in grad school will ultimately be measured will be how many peer-reviewed papers I've published. I'm up to seven (that's quite respectable), of which six are first-author (that's good, too). I have a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. All of these things combined mean that I should do quite well when I go looking for a job in a couple of years. I could make big bucks in industry; with the right postdoc and a pinch of fairy dust, I could probably land a pretty sweet gig as a professor. In other words, if I want to be a chemist, I'm doing all the right things. But do I want to be a chemist? Do I want my principle habitat to be a laboratory? Do I want a career (and we're not talking a nine to five) that I spend under fluorescent lights?

I thought I did. And then I went here:

Don't get me wrong. I love chemistry. But I love lots of other things, too, and some of them I love more than chemistry. Writing, for example. And hiking. And this:

And these:

And food from the earth and simplicity and imagining possibilities.

In other words, what I aspire to is to spend my days living in harmony with nature, physically exploring my physical surroundings and discovering an imagined landscape through writing, all this done, of course, from a cozy, natural home. When my wanderlust strikes, I'll set out in search of grander adventures, see the world one bit and piece at a time, and happily return to the comfort of home-cooked food and a crackling fire. That's the life I find myself dreaming of. That's where I hope to find myself eventually. So here follows the story of where I wind up, whether I bridge the gap from here to there and by what route.