I’ve always been a bit of a prima donna when it comes to jobs.
Not that I want everything at a job. Or treated like a superstar at my job. But that I just have certain things I don’t want from a job.
I don’t want jobs that start too early. Or have a windowless office. Or require me to do something I don’t have an aptitude for.
I don’t like jobs that have too much process. Or have ebb and flow where it’s boring sometimes and hectic others, with zero control of my schedule. Or sit in a Bullpen with a lot to do but where people are distracting me. And I hate “locked” jobs where I have to work in an office 8 to 5 every day with no flexibility to my days or schedule minus pre-determined vacation time.
I’d love to say this is new. That’s it’s my age. But it’s not. I’ve always been this way.
Time was I really thought I hated working. But it turned out that I hated working hourly jobs with time requirements and where I was a drone.
I learned when I went into teaching and into sales that I’m actually an incredibly hard worker. And very determined and quite good. When I’m given flexibility and freedom to do what I think needs to be done.
I went into real estate. And like it. But it isn’t paying the bills. I need to pad this income. So am looking at supplemental jobs. And am driving myself crazy in the process because so many jobs are either micromanagement hell (one has two syncs per day to keep the manager updated on what we’ve been doing) or have fixed schedules in an office that are 40 hours per week.
Here is to continuing my search. And not giving in to a job that will make me unhappy. Because I’m 58. I’ve done more than my share of jobs that make me unhappy. And life is just too short, especially at age 58.
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
For much of my life, I’d have to list Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve as my favorite holidays. But in recent years I think my penchant for Labor Day has exceeded my historical love of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Labor Day is a guilt-free holiday that is placed in one of the most beautiful times of year in the Seattle area.
So many of our holidays (Thanksgiving, President’s Day) fall in the gloom of Seattle’s rainy season. Or they (Christmas, July 4th) have expectations or are just plain loud and overbearing. Or they (Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Day) have some guilt associated with them. Or (New Year’s Eve) I’m just plain exhausted from the demands of the previous month.
But Labor Day is different.
Families and Friends don’t expect us on Labor Day. Budgets aren’t destroyed shopping for food and buying presents. It is a day to reward us for our hard work and not to remind us of someone else’s sacrifice. It’s quiet. And September is usually perfect weather in Seattle what with the continued sun and 70 degree days.
Childhood and parenthood can taint Labor Day, since it usually commemorates the beginning of a long school year ahead. But my kids are older. And my own school experience was decades ago. So that particular emotional taint of Labor Day is over. In fact, for me, Labor Day has just become the perfect expectation-free holiday.
There aren’t carols written or sung about Labor Day. Labor Day doesn’t usually conjure strong memories of past times and places. But it’s a special day nonetheless. And it has become in my older and wiser years my very favorite holiday of the year.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
How The Passage Of Time Has Influenced My Perspective
I was 43 the first time I started to relax.
For 20 years of my adulthood I’d fretted and toiled. Fretted and toiled, mostly about each of life’s milestones.
First, it was to graduate college. I was going to university in a small town that I didn’t like very much, because being in my early 20s I didn’t want to be in a small town — I wanted to be in the city! So I wanted out of that college, and the best way to do that was to graduate, so I fretted and toiled my way toward graduation.
Then I graduated and it was time to get my career going. Except we were in a mini-recession (early 90s) at the time and no one was hiring recent college graduates. So I worked a series of grunt jobs as a mover and a DJ and bank teller and tutor, and meanwhile went back to school to earn my teaching certification. I’d love to say those were good times, but they weren’t: it was a time of very low checking account balances and day-to-day drudgery and all through those years I fretted and I toiled.
Then I got out of school and got my first career job and then wanted so desperately to have a house. I felt like houses were out of my reach, and felt a lot of resentment at older generations for creating a world where I couldn’t afford a house. I spent a lot of time fretting and toiling although after a few years I was actually able to buy a house (!).
And so it went.
Every single step of the way, year after year of my 20s and then my 30s, I fretted and toiled. Fretted and toiled. I was pretty miserable most of the time, if I’m honest. Yes, I had my moments of joy, and on the surface everyone always commented how happy I seemed, but there was just this overwhelming sense of toiling and fretting surging through my veins like an invisible poison. I worked and worked, and when I wasn’t working I was taking care of the kids and the house and covering for an always-absent (now ex) wife, and all the time I worried and fretted about this and that, always worrying about the next milestone.
Then there was hope!
There was a moment — actually two — when I was 43 when I finally relaxed.
The first moment was on an early morning bike ride. We were at our vacation home, which I loved BUT which I was forever worried about paying for, and we were at the house one summer week when I was on a dawn mountain bike ride through the forest. There was a moment along the river when suddenly I realized the early morning sun was on my face, and the birds were singing all around me, and the river was murmuring next to me, and meanwhile the sweet smell of nature was in the air. And suddenly I just stopped. I stopped, got off my bike, and just soaked in that moment for a minute, then two minutes, then 15 minutes. There literally was not another human being around me, and I suddenly wondered if I were in heaven because it was just soooooo peaceful. Up until that time, I’d never experienced a moment like that before.
The next moment when I relaxed was THE moment when I relaxed. Age 43, and having dinner with my parents, and was making great money, and my work seemed to love me, and the kids were teens and seemed happy, and my (now ex) wife was around helping a little more often, and I was even still in my athletic prime (I’d batted .920 in and still regularly making diving catches during the recently-ended softball season), and suddenly I thought, “I’ve made it. I’m going to be okay.” I actually thought life might freeze at that very moment, where I’d be okay and age 43 forever.
But time didn’t stop. And (thankfully) life didn’t stop.
It kept on coming. Moment after moment, day after day, year after year.
That was way over 10 years ago.
In the decade since that moment at dinner with my parents, so many changes have happened in my life. I was let go for the very first time, and then for the second time. I battled a fluke lung disease (successfully, thank goodness). I got divorced and then after promising myself I’d never date again actually dated again and got remarried again (to a much more present person than my ex was). And meanwhile the years just keep on coming. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
To me, the most shocking things aren’t the life changes I’ve undergone since I was 43 (actually, each one of them has been a blessing). It’s that each year just keeps on passing. That life just keeps on passing. One year after the other. And it makes me realize the folly of toiling and fretting about milestones, about wanting to achieve certain things on a certain timeframe in life at the expense of being in the moment. Because life is in that moment. My amazing ex-grandmother-in-law used to say, “Life is what happens while you’re making your future plans.” How true that is.
I wish I could go back in time. And to tell myself to stop fretting. And to stop toiling. Because that stole so much happiness from me, and sucked 20 years of my life away.
But.
But!
I’m here now. And presumably I still have a few decades of good life left in me. And I’ve been influenced by the passage of time in that I’ve learned to just be in the moment, to just feel joy in the here and now, and to take a moment to appreciate each and every day.
Regret is folly. Better is to take what we’ve learned and to apply that to our present and future. Because our present and future is all we have in our life. And I’m just so grateful that time has taught me to appreciate today.
Wishing you a great day.
NOTES:
Every day WordPress offers a writing prompt. I’ve never been a writing prompt person but actually have been enjoying these prompts. This is my response to today’s prompt.
Life, Work & Wonder 