The best job in the world

I think that I have the best job in the world.
Not only I think that. I am fully convinced about that.

I am a scientist and I am proud of it. There is nothing more powerful, more wonderful, more challenging, more heart-shaking that feeling part of the ones who discover things. I imagine Leonardo, Darwin, Einstein, and all those people who moved our understanding of things a step forward and even if I am not like them and I will never be, just feeling allowed to be part of the same community to which they belong too, it is a fulfillment.

I was watching a talk on Ted. Not a great talk I have to say. But it still gave me a lot of emotions. I love this world. Not what we are doing to this world, but the world itself. I love the nature that is around us. I love the diversity. I love to understand the factors that promote the diversity that we observe. What it is outside there is magnificent. And I am always feel short of world when I see a documentary or just when I walk around in nature or when I scuba dive.

I am having a hard life in my work. What I am doing is not economically valuable. My kind of science is for understanding, to discover things that maybe one day could benefit the human kind, but not now. And now economically. Some days are just so hard that I feel that I am too idealist and that my passion will not be something I will be able to live off. Some days I hear in my head the voice of my uncle telling me to get "a real job, and stop to just play around".

It is true. Us, the scientists, we play around. We don't do anything important. We build knowledge. But knowledge is not something you can eat, nor something that makes you feel warm when it snows outside. But I love it, with all myself. When I have a bad day, when my motivation is down, when I feel that I should quite, what keeps me going is the thought of myself in Venezuela, working for a marine park. The image of myself floating underwater somewhere, the image of myself in the jungle, covered in mud, the image of myself looking at a mom scorpion with its babies on the back. And I know that in all these moments I feel part of nature, and I feel in peace, and I feel I am in the right place. I feel full.

I know that all this sounds very boring to most of the people. But to be in peace, I need to feel in the nature, to be part of it. My job for me is more than a job and this is what keeps me going in the days in which I feel that what I am doing is not valuable.

What I am doing is not valuable for most of the people.
But it has no price to me. I wouldn't be the person I am without it. I am a scientist and being a scientist is not a job for me. It is a way too look at the entire world.

I wish I could do something to show to people how much beauty there is in it, in this world, in nature, before we destroy most of it.