By guest blogger Alice Petty

I discovered archaeology the summer before my final year of college. On a whim, I applied to a field school in Israel and in that one season, I fell in love. I could imagine nothing more glamorous and exciting than being an archaeologist – the global travel and discovery, the thrill of rummaging through history’s wastebasket, uncovering all of her dirty, unpublished secrets. So I went to grad school, and spent the better part of a decade on my Ph.D. During that time, I worked in the storerooms of several world class museums and did a great deal of research and teaching. I spent every summer in rural Syria excavating what eventually was revealed to be an intact Early Bronze Age (c. 2600 BC) mortuary complex, complete with incredible treasures of gold and animal sacrifices. I once shimmied down the shaft of a New Kingdom Egyptian tomb, glancing up at the sky and actually thinking to myself the words, “This is my dream come true!”  Archaeology was, for a number of years, the love of my life.

I still vividly remember the moment I realized that my feelings changed. I was living in New York City, where I held a research fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and had just landed a competitive fellowship to study ancient law in a villa in Florence, Italy as soon as my gig at the Met was over. I was thinking ahead though, about what to do once my fellowship in Italy ended. Applying for jobs, I felt anxious and unfocused. I kept getting up to take a walk, or make a snack, or do housework, or surf the web. I was tired, but I had trouble falling asleep at night.

The thing with academic careers is that you rarely get to choose where you live. You follow the job and hope it lands you someplace cool. In this moment, I was applying for a job at a college in Mississippi. I did not want to go there. I was a city girl, and this was rural Mississippi; I was a liberal democrat, and this was in a notoriously politically conservative locale; I had no family or friends within something like an 800 mile radius. But the job was in my field so I had to apply for it.

It had taken days to prepare my application. There were writing samples, letters of recommendation, research proposals and several sample course syllabi. As I stood there, on a New York sidewalk, poised to mail my application, I looked around at my happy life in my beloved NYC and imagined myself in Mississippi with no sidewalks or noise or subways or tall buildings. I suddenly wanted to be doing anything else–making a snack, washing dishes, surfing the web- anything but mailing this application. It came to me with sudden, alarming clarity: It matters to me a great deal, where I live. This hadn’t always been the case, but now it was.  What matters to me, I thought, has changed because I have changed, and now the way I feel about the plans I’ve made for my life are changing, too. And then, as if a light bulb clicked on in the field above my head, I thought, This isn’t what I want anymore. Then, despite the epiphany, I dropped my application into the mailbox, and started to cry, right there on the sidewalk. I knew that if I got the job, I would probably take it and be miserable.

Self-conscious and with a sinking, heavy feeling in my chest I walked back to my apartment, thinking, I never want to do this again. I never want to betray myself by spending my time and energy trying to get something that I don’t even want. I decided then and there to make a practice of actively reflecting on my life so that I could make honest choices about the kind of person I want to be and the kind of work I want to do.  Reflection, I realized, is the difference between charting your own course and going with the flow; between choosing a meaningful life or accepting a serviceable one.

And now here I am, working in a new career and living in a new city that I love. When I moved, I brought with me a black peacoat from NY. I loved the thing: it was perfect, neither too heavy or too light; something nice enough to wear to work, it fit over sweaters and wouldn’t get wrecked in the rain. It was wide on the bottom and had a retro swing to it. I bought it on sale, which made me love it even more. The tag said “Dry Clean Only,” but I washed it in the machine and it was fine. It was a great coat.

Two weeks ago my husband turned to me in the kitchen and said, out of the blue, “That coat you wore today? It’s horrible. You have got to get rid of it. You need a new coat.”

I was shocked.

“It is ragged and shabby looking,” he continued, “and it doesn’t fit.”

“It’s a little big,” I conceded.

“Not just too big,” he added, “It doesn’t fit you.” That weekend, I started filling a bag for donation. I started with the coat.

My breakup with archaeology taught me something valuable. Sometimes we discard things –relationships, soup bowls, electronic appliances, plans or intentions, or peacoats – not because they are damaged or broken, but because they just don’t fit who we are anymore. It can be hard to discard things that are still viable but that no longer fit. It feels wasteful; as if it’s some kind of moral failing to seek out something new when what you have is still perfectly serviceable. But even though archaeology is as beloved to me as my well-worn and ill-fitting peacoat and Mississippi would have been, I am sure, a fine place to live, I just wasn’t into it anymore. Better things awaited.

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Alice Petty is the UAR Academic Director in Wilbur Hall, where she takes enthusiastic delight in helping students reflect, choose, plan, dream, and occasionally discard things that no longer fit.