I quit my job today. I had been working there for a bit more than three years.
For some reason I usually use 72 as my go-to denominator when considering lifetime ratios. It may be a bit miserly but it is not far off. And if you consider that eighty is a more realistic life expectancy, 72 nicely allows for a few years at the beginning and/or the end to be hors concours. Perhaps more appropriately, it has a convenient set of prime factors.
So according to my reasoned reckoning, the three years I spent engaged in the pursuit from which I walk away today essentially empty-handed represents one twenty-fourth of my life. Which itself is more or less four percent. And there it goes.
It would be shortsighted to consider that squandered time. Lessons were learned, and if they were not always learned quickly then in most cases it is likely that the pupil was not adequately prepared. Until now, my career has remained in my mind the glaring exception to the otherwise almost universal transformation which I have undergone in the recent past - whether I consider that time frame to be the past year, the past 17 months, the past two years, or the past 27 months, my dissatisfying career and the attendant dysfunctional employment situation in which I found myself is the constant unresolved and unbroken bitter and unpalatable thread weaving through that time.
27 months ago I met LB and my planet shuddered, the reverberations from which would take some time but would eventually shatter the foundations of my entire existence.
2 years ago I stubbornly and courageously took a leap of faith and put an end to a toxic and hypoxic relationship with SO, and blindly charted a solo course, with little other than momentum to propel me forward, and plenty of obstacles.
17 months ago I handed over my home to its new owner and set out on an odyssey of which persists to this day of establishing and/or failing to establish and moving on chasing my comfort zone.
One year ago I embarked on the greatest wave of growth I have ever experienced, a tsunami which sustained me and helped me to build and to grow, which endured for months, and which destroyed all doubt which lay in its path. And while it has seemingly relented, it has yet to exhaust itself, and I feel its effects to this day. This impulse reoriented my perspective on everything.
And this evening, I finally pulled the trigger on a long-overdue execution, banishing a myth which had long since degenerated into rainbow-chasing, if indeed it had ever been anything but that.
