NaNoWriMo

After dropping out of two rounds of novel_in_90 in a row due to a some sort of mental block (not writer's block, something else) I'm doing NaNoWriMo for the first time. I have a fun idea, and it's conducive to being shared, so I'll be posting my story in an LJ account I just made for it, for alansaynsberry. The title of the project is "A Faithful Recounting on the Journeys of Alan Saynsberry, of late Naturalist Aboard Her Majesty's Ship Constellation."

Was It Really That Easy All Along?

In one sentence, Stephen Jay Gould just explained what the four scholarly loves of my life have in common: "Many large domains of nature - cosmology, geology, and evolution among them - must be studied with the tools of history." (Wonderful Life, p. 277)

I don't know if any quote I've ever read in my life has spoken to me so clearly as speaking directly to my own experience, or clarified something so well that had seemed so complicated. I've been deeply contemplative of a central question of late - what do I want to do with myself? I love history, but I despite my BA I don't have much interest in pursuing it as a career. Since I was a child, I've loved science, particularly astronomy, genetics, and earth science. Or, put another way without shedding much meaning, cosmology, geology and evolution.

It seems so obvious now that I've seen this sentence just how related these things are, and of course scientifically I always knew where they stood in comparison to each other, but somehow, having read what Gould wrote in passing while discussing a completely different topic, it suddenly seems crystal clear why I'm so attracted to these particular fields, and how that relates to history, which has always drawn me as well.

This is a major revelation, but it doesn't answer my central problem (with which I've been grappling for months): where to next? I feel like perhaps it's a first step, though. (And no, history of science isn't the obvious answer, because as I said I don't think I want to do history on that scale).