Pearls: Chase your interests

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

Doing the right thing can be difficult. Knowing which thing is right can be even tougher.

You get to a certain age and realize that making decisions isn’t really that hard: what’s tough is differentiating between the choices – what am I really picking? What are the consequences of the different options? If I know (or fell like I know) what the choices represent, I have never had much trouble making my decision.

One of the more difficult choices I have been called to make in my professional life is the decision about where my future lies: Am I a teacher or am I a publisher? I have agonized over this for 20 years. As soon as I favor one, the other seems to get its hooks into me. I gave up teaching for three years from 2015 to 2018, but jumped back into it when I saw a good chance.

At the expense of spending a few hundred words writing about myself and making this column not relatable to other folks, I’ll just say that sometimes, as crazy as it sounds, you have to pick both when each individual choice leaves you wanting for some aspect of the other.

Thanksgiving or Christmas? Both. Football or basketball? Both. Publisher or teacher?

Both. It’s both.

I have finally come to understand that finding balance in life is a challenge for everyone. You are not choosing perhaps between two careers, but you are daily being forced to pick one option or the other. It can be as inconsequential as which meal combo on a fast-food menu you crave, to the more important choices, like your significant other or which community you want to call home.

Balance is key. I used to say to myself, ‘If you didn’t teach, you could be a better publisher,’ or ‘If you’d sell out of the newspaper business, you could be a better educator.’ I don’t say that anymore, because I realized something that carries into every aspect of my life:

While I am publishing, I need to be the best publisher I am able to be. It is okay to stop being an editor and do something else when my work is done. When I’m teacher, I need to be the best teacher I can be, and when the school day ends, I can put the work down and pick it up tomorrow. It will all still be there, right where I left it.

While I’m being a father, I need to parent the best I am able. Sometimes that means giving piggyback rides and sometimes that means typing at my keyboard and tolerating the noise that kids make. Being a husband and father permeates the rest of my tasks, because my wife and children have reasonable expectations regarding my time and attention.

You and I can be more than one thing, and indeed we need to do so. Farmers have to be part horticulturist, part mechanic, part meteorologist – and a dozen other tasks. The rest of us need to embrace the fact that life is going to give us multiple interests and several talents, and one of our great blessings is putting all of them to work.

We have the frequent opportunity to grow, to take on something different, to find ways to add more to our lives. Don’t get me wrong: we can’t do everything, but we can do lots of things.

Louis Bowman, the founder of the former Tri-County News and Missouri Press Association Past President and MPA Hall of Famer, was King City’s postmaster for much of the time he was publishing his newspaper. Louis is one of my inspirations. Albany had Jim Fall publishing The Ledger for several years, but later he diversified and entered city government up at Maryville. Bob Cobb and my father, Larry Pearl, each simultaneously taught and worked in newspaper.

I have some wonderful examples I have been blessed to follow, and their actions spoke louder thatn these words, but the lesson was essentially this: ‘Chase your interests. Life is richer when you fill it with your interests and callings.’

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City and Albany.