![]() ![]() ![]() In her book One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty says that the job of the writer is “to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” Maybe it was the rhythm, the way the words swerved and swayed innocently into a dark place – and then stood still. (As in: If I want to accomplish “X” by 2010, what do I need to do be working on right now?) But tonight I want to talk about what might happen if one loses confidence in the accounting and the balance sheets loses a sense of the bottom line: loses, perhaps, the very story of one’s life.When I was a sophomore in high school, I came across a phrase that I had no art to decipher, but that nonetheless made a little knot in my memory. Even if my “five-year plan” changes, there’s a part of my mind that’s always set in the future, and operating backwards. It’s not that I don’t live by lists and charts and calendars, because I do. So tonight, I am going to take a bit of a risk in turning back to the figurative. To chart our paths, we get good at making charts, and learning how to follow them. We are rightly skeptical about cultural messages that come wrapped in the words of “value,” “worth,” and the final “measure” of a life, and turn instead to a different model of “accounting” for ourselves: costs and benefits, sacrifices and investments, opting-in or opting-out, and always, always management. ![]() ![]() When women talk about a career/life balance, we often step away from figurative language and toward a language of figuring. ![]()
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