Hey. How’s it going? It’s been a while. It's like seven weeks. I’ve lived a lifetime since I last wrote a post here. A lot has changed. Although mostly, it hasn’t.
My absence mainly started because my family took a road trip from Seattle to Southern California. Every single kid puked once. We swam almost every day for two weeks. I had multiple buckets of Coronas. We went from lush green to drylands and felt the brunt of 110+ degree temperatures. We played volleyball in a pool at 9 pm while it was still 90 degrees outside. We hung out with family in the Bay area and Los Angeles. We listened to Snoop, Tupac, and Kendrick Lamar at Dodgers Stadium.
I also quit my job and got another job—a job I quit two years ago. The overwhelming question I’ve gotten is, “Why?” The simple answer is health insurance. The other answer is that I’m not emotional about work anymore. Jobs are jobs. Pay is pay. You have to limit them from deferring your passion and dreams.
It may seem like some submission, but isn’t life about making compromises with our surroundings – our friends, our careers, our time – to make life work for us?
I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately and how we use, lose, sustain, and make the most of it.
I think I lost some time during the last two years worrying about things that didn’t matter and over which I didn’t have complete control. I lost a lot of time, equity, and stability because of time, mostly around things like I wasn’t already at a career stage by a specific time. I cringe, thinking about my obsession with titles, promotions, projects to work on, or who my boss would be. I wasted a lot of time thinking about the conversations I needed to have, the positioning I needed to take, and the message I needed to refine to reach some weird fantasy of a place in my career. I spent so much time thinking about my next moves, what should have been mine, or the recognition I didn’t receive that I felt entitled to.
And yet here I am, a little wiser, experienced with the genuine journey of seeing that the grass isn’t always greener. Like Matt Damon’s character in “Rounders,” he had to go sky-high to get knocked down to see what he was made of when he got back up. The time I took these last two years to figure out some significant things about what I want in my career was necessary, invaluable, and somewhat painful. But today, I feel like I’m back to three stacks of high society.
So, as I think about how I want to spend my time, I sit here focused on the things I can control: the time I spend thinking about making loved ones happy, the time I spend planning the memories I want to make with those I care about most and the time I spend being happy about what I have versus what I should have. The latter is a struggle and a balance. Maybe you can relate.
I recently reorganized my vinyl and stumbled upon my favorite Moodyman 3LP set. Take a listen and add it to your playlists.