{"id":63,"date":"2020-12-22T15:49:50","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T15:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thinkingoutloudhere.com\/?p=63"},"modified":"2021-10-22T20:05:07","modified_gmt":"2021-10-22T20:05:07","slug":"porter-pilgrimage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/porterpilgrimage.com\/?p=63","title":{"rendered":"Porter’s Pilgrimage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 \u201cdone\u201d with shopping and a sense of dread that, once again, what I\u2019ve done is \u201cnot enough.\u201d 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 \u201cvacation,\u201d 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 \u2013 all within the same month. It\u2019s been too cold for him to comfortably do anything outside, so he\u2019s been frittering away his free time in a frustrating cycle of naps and TV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Except for the Christmas presents dilemma, this is our life. I do nothing but work \u2013 think about it, work at it, dream about it, agonize over it, etc. In between work, there\u2019s 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\u2019s life \u2013 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\u2019s college; documenting our monthly spend versus managing it; and on and on. That proportion of time, energy, and focus \u2013 work, school, life \u2013 is way out of balance. I\u2019ve known it for a long time. I\u2019ve 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, \u201cI don\u2019t want to do this anymore. I don\u2019t want to work this way for the rest of my life.\u201d Couple that with Chris\u2019s view of his work \u2013 endless months stretching ahead of the same, torturous schedule, one that gets harder with each year that passes, and there you have it\u2026..we\u2019re opting out.        <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s only getting harder the older he gets. I want him to be able to rest, recover, and experience life the way it\u2019s 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\u2019t always line up with the purpose and pace I\u2019d like to set for my life. For school, I want time to sink into my research and the focus of my dissertation. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019re opting out of corporate life and into a pilgrimage to rediscover ourselves as individuals, as partners, and purpose-filled individuals living in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m using the word \u201cpilgrimage\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>Pope Benedict XVI<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s no finish line on the corporate treadmill. The proverbial hamster wheel only turns faster and faster. I\u2019m tired of running without purpose. Actually, it might be more accurate to say, the treadmill I\u2019ve been on has served its purpose. The job has been very good to me and my family, and I\u2019ve been very good to my job. Now, I want something else, something that fills me up and centers me. It\u2019s no longer the house on the hill that we want; we want the hills and other beautiful places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I take comfort that this decision has been a long-time coming and isn\u2019t a product of the emotion of the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n