Life's work is waiting

There was this one Christmas where Grandad Bruce won a small profit from a Lotto draw, after 30 years of diligent weekly patronage. He decided the most appropriate way to divvy out the dosh was to shout his entire family a skydive on Boxing Day. The morning of, it was quite a spectacle to observe the pyscho-dynamics of our largely facetious and performative clan curdle in the face of existential reflection. It’s funny how we flirt with what we fear like this. On the surface it’s self sabotage, but chip a little further and what we usually find is a ‘yes’ to external risk is in fact a way of short circuiting our pride. Recalibrating, as the illusion of control is exposed as a dubious, self-constructed cuddly blanket. We know we need it, we just can’t admit it outright. 

After a near 3 years of diligent weekly patronage, I've quit my job. And just like what was witnessed on that (totally fine and anti-climactic) skydive day, I handed in my notice feeling petrified I would never have the choice to reclaim what I gave up if I went ahead. As is true of any weighted decision across the board, this is typically the most appropriate moment to jump.

It’s scariest having an era or phase end knowing you made the choice. You rocked the boat, killed the switch, let the leash go. But maybe these changes are the biggest, most grown up, most hindsight-rich ones. When you weren’t forced into it or given no option but to adapt. Instead you looked, at length and with honesty, and decided to follow the flickering thing that appeared inside.

*And forget not how utterly privileged you are in even having the freedom to do so when you can.
 
Being a serial idealiser I can attest: it’s fun to rehearse the fantasy. Untouched and unlimited. But on opening night, when the murmur of the expectant crowd is on the other side of the curtain and it’s actually happening? That’s some serious nausea. 
I had spent countless (salaried) hours lost in puckish playback-loop fantasies about this very liberation, and now wanted to immortalise all it had given by holding things tighter than ever. Suddenly fetishising the banal dimensions of office life, entering a short lived and ill-fit phase of watching ‘Suits’ just to hang onto some thread of corporate doublespeak and the ever curious arrogance of rapacious professional males. In truth, it was a feeling of distrust. A kind of limbic friction that at the time didn’t allow a full tipping into excitement for this newfound freedom…With unbounded options and a free-for-all sense of time and self as I go forward from here. Emotions rampant and open, attractions elevated and charged by the romanticism of travel and its gift of glorious self-delusion. I don’t know if I trust myself without obligation to, or direction from, some form of structure and contract anymore. I had liked the version of myself that this job nurtured: sort of detached, effective, clear, on schedule, mature. 

When everyone is off on weekends it feels ok to relax and unfurl. Safe and sound. Soon though, when they’re all back at it and I’m the one blissfully unreachable and unemployed, there’s likely to be an ambient charge coursing through me - unrest. Is it a bit woeful to have toyed with the idea of staying looped into Teams chats and the knowledge of projects ongoing? (short answer, yes.) Not because of some sick addiction or love of the actual work, or a persistent FOMO. But because of a need to feel important - like I am contributing to something. Feeling required and involved. 
I’ve just seen and known the perils of too much spare time and self enquiry. Necessary to a point, but then the toiling and turning over of thoughts and personal perceptions needs to be dropped. Some commitment to a common, bigger thing needs to rescue and reclaim your attention.  

Now I find myself excessively journaling about it. Like I’m in preparation for some inevitable amnesia and the things that have me so enraptured in the simple and predicable now will no longer be retrievable once the context is altered. Journeying through this flawed ideological position saw a compelling first stop at the rational vantage point: ‘if it’s not broken, why fix it?’ And was called to a welcome halt as I plunged into the epiphanic words of a wise and amiable foreign waiter,

“There is no better thing in life than travelling. Oh wait.. maybe actually being in love. Wait! No better thing in life than being in love AND travelling.” 

And so a little test drive trip to Australia last month served as a decent marker. I returned resolute and certain… It’s never not the time to prioritise the life story. As one friend and I often sign off obscurities brought about by the self-splitting trance of adventure with: well well, one for the memoir!

Beyond empty ‘glamour travel’, this is what reminds us we are alive. Grooving in time with humanity, part of something bigger. In love with a person, a place, or just a perspective - who cares, all great! Placing that same yearning I had mistakenly outsourced to a particular business efficiency app back into the hands of the mystical idea we call destiny.  

On-site at my last work event a few weeks ago, Senior Aboriginal Man, Uncle Mickey O'Brien, shared something during his Welcome to Country that has really made its way down deep: in Aboriginal language there is no directly translatable word for goodbye, because it is their view that relationships - however brief or monumental - remain with us forever. An acknowledgement that the ending of one experience will soon transmute into the next beginning. 

So bubbye, bon voyage, life’s work is waiting.