It is December, a few days before Christmas. I have a pile of presents in my spare closet, waiting to be wrapped. My heart wavers between a sense of relief of being “done” with shopping and a sense of dread that, once again, what I’ve done is “not enough.” My home office upstairs is littered with sticky notes and deliverables for work that routinely jerk me out of a sound sleep around 2 in the morning. I had two meetings yesterday, my first day of “vacation,” and I have two more today. For school, I am delicately balancing one assignment behind without creating a tsunami of overdue assignments in my current course, a 12-week statistics course. Chris is fighting time scarcity, watching the days tick away before he has to start his next round of nightshift, 5 nights of nights followed by 3 days, then 2 nights, then 4 days – all within the same month. It’s been too cold for him to comfortably do anything outside, so he’s been frittering away his free time in a frustrating cycle of naps and TV.
Except for the Christmas presents dilemma, this is our life. I do nothing but work – think about it, work at it, dream about it, agonize over it, etc. In between work, there’s school, which should be invigorating, but with my workload, is yet another thing that I have to manage. And in between work and school, there’s life – sometimes cooking, most of the time getting takeout; cleaning in overwhelmed spurts when my frustration reaches a tipping point; vacillating between trying to keep Gen happy and occupied (which, for those of you without teenagers looks like trips to Walmart, continual requests to go do something, getting her nails done, tec.) and trying to control the madness and the money that accompanies the need to keep a single teenager occupied; planning for Gen’s college; documenting our monthly spend versus managing it; and on and on. That proportion of time, energy, and focus – work, school, life – is way out of balance. I’ve known it for a long time. I’ve allowed work to consume me, and the higher I climb in the organization, the more consuming work will become. Thus, the source of my mental refrain for the last three years, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to work this way for the rest of my life.” Couple that with Chris’s view of his work – endless months stretching ahead of the same, torturous schedule, one that gets harder with each year that passes, and there you have it…..we’re opting out.
For Chris, my goal is for him to be able to quit work completely and focus on being our Chief Travel Officer. Although his current job is relatively easy, the rotating shift work is not. Rolling from nights to days, twice within the same month, is brutal on his circadian rhythms. And it’s only getting harder the older he gets. I want him to be able to rest, recover, and experience life the way it’s meant to be experienced. For me, my goals are a little bit different. I actually like to work. I like to be busy and needed. The difference is the pace, purpose, and scope of my current job doesn’t always line up with the purpose and pace I’d like to set for my life. For school, I want time to sink into my research and the focus of my dissertation. I don’t want to just do a fly-by on the topic. I want to immerse myself in it, allow myself to consume and be consumed by it. For work, I want to do work that matters, not waste time on bureaucratic nonsense that doesn’t matter for an organization where enough is never enough. I want to write more. I want to be present in my life, tipping the scale of life-work-school back into balance. For all of those reasons, we’re opting out of corporate life and into a pilgrimage to rediscover ourselves as individuals, as partners, and purpose-filled individuals living in the present.
I’m using the word “pilgrimage” on purpose. This choice we are making, this turning in another direction, is essentially a pilgrimage for us, a returning to our center, a journey of self-discovery.
“To go on pilgrimage is not simply to visit a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history. To go on pilgrimage really means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where he has revealed himself, where his grace has shone with particular splendour and produced rich fruits of conversion and holiness among those who believe.”
Pope Benedict XVI
That is what we are choosing to do with this change. Step out of ourselves, step off this treadmill to find ourselves, to experience this amazing world that God has created, to be present and richly immersed in each day, appreciating the blessings. There’s no finish line on the corporate treadmill. The proverbial hamster wheel only turns faster and faster. I’m tired of running without purpose. Actually, it might be more accurate to say, the treadmill I’ve been on has served its purpose. The job has been very good to me and my family, and I’ve been very good to my job. Now, I want something else, something that fills me up and centers me. It’s no longer the house on the hill that we want; we want the hills and other beautiful places.
I take comfort that this decision has been a long-time coming and isn’t a product of the emotion of the moment.
- I remember the first time I read Wuthering Heights, shutting the cover after reading the last sentence, stunned that someone could write something over 100 years ago that still had the power to move me today – and wanting desperately to be able to produce something nearly half that good.
- I remember watching my favorite father-in-law battling ICU Psychosis while in the hospital with pneumonia, heart-broken over his disconnected phrases and mutterings about work tasks 40 years ago. (I now know it was the morphine talking.)
- I remember seeing a video of my Dad cutting grass in the little 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in Simpsonville, one week before he died, and realizing with heart-breaking clarity that he died well before he could ever achieve and experience what he had hoped for his life.
- I remember sobbing over the realization that Gen’s best friend’s mom had more pictures of Gen from her high-school cheerleading career on her Facebook than I had on my phone. Where had I been all that time?
- I remember the beauty of our trips to Alaska, Colorado, and Montana that left us hungry for more.
Our trip to Montana this year changed us. It showed us something could be different. It reminded us how much we enjoyed, and have missed, time together. Working from home during Covid 19 quarantine did the same thing. All of those things, past and present, have come together to this decision, to heading out on our pilgrimage together.
This week is Christmas and then New Years. Following Christmas, the real transition work begins. We have eight months to prepare Gen for college, purge the house, and set our new RV in motion. In August 2021, we will sell the house and Chris can stop working when the house sells. In December 2021, I will transition out of my current job. I have the financials worked out. As we get closer to our launch date, I’ll start finding my next job. My hope is that my next job is a supplement to the writing and research that I will do, and I may even start my own leadership consulting and keynote company. This pilgrimage is happening. It’s founded on a solid “why” with the right amount of research, preparation, and planning. Let’s go!
