aroraborealis

Hey friends!

Astute readers will notice that I didn't kick off a confessional post yesterday. Although I hadn't really made a conscious decision about this one way or another, I now realize that last year's was the last one for me. Sorry I didn't realize this earlier so someone else who wanted to host one on the traditional day could do so. But! Please feel free to take the idea and run with it. I've super enjoyed these over the years and I appreciate everyone who has participated and helped to make them a really special and unique shared experience. I'll probably have a longer post later with more musings but this is it for now.

Normally, this is a once-a-day gratitude practice for the week of Thanksgiving, but November was hard.

I'm grateful for change and the knowledge that what's difficult today will not always be difficult. Of course, new difficulties will arise, and there's every chance that today's challenges will grow even larger in coming days, but the fact of change means that nothing is forever, and that fact is the key to the door of hope. I'm stashing that key in my locket for all those times when I need it.

In March, I nominally took over a team of an unspecified number of people. The number was unspecified because it was unknown! So one of my first tasks was to figure out, based on organization and role, how many people were in what would ultimately become my team.

That number turns out to be 40, which is a lot of people! And yesterday, I took them out of the office for a day to start to build an explicit sense of team by working together to create a brand statement and some team agreements.

I've run a lot of offsites and workshops in a lot of settings and for a variety of configurations of people, but this was my first time designing, planning, organizing, and running this kind of event as the head of the team. It was interestingly basically entirely familiar and also completely strange and different. In particular, I repeatedly found myself joshing around with the team, and then having a twist of realization that, wait, I'm the boss! Which, I don't know, it's not like that changes that we're all humans together, and, yet, it also totally changes things, and in ways that are probably less perceptible to me than to others.

Forty people is a lot! I'm feeling this in a lot of ways, especially because I currently don't have enough managers in the team, so I have too many people reporting directly to me. I'm in the process of changing this, and I dearly hope to have at least two and possibly three more managers on board by the end of the year.

I've also never managed managers before! And I'm learning that that has its own challenges and pitfalls, possibly more for me than the initial transition to management.

I feel like I'm having a similar kind of fun to having kids: It's exhausting, demanding, tiring ... but there are moments of brilliant satisfaction and reward, and if I can navigate the process successfully, I'll feel like I created something amazing. But my day-to-day happiness is definitely taking a hit.

At least they haven't taken to waking me up in the middle of the night!

Wild by Tony Hoagland

In late August when the streams dry up
and the high meadows turn parched and blond,

bears are squeezed out of the mountains
down into the valley of condos and housing developments.

All residents are therefore prohibited
from putting their garbage out early.

The penalty for disobedience will be
bears: large black furry fellows

drinking from your sprinkler system,
rolling your trashcans down your lawn,

bashing through the screen door of the back porch to get their
first real taste of a spaghetti dinner,

while the family hides in the garage
and the wife dials 1-800-BEARS on her cell phone,

a number she just made up
in a burst of creative hysteria.

Isn't that the way it goes?
Wildness enters your life and asks

that you invent a way to meet it,
and you run in the opposite direction

as the bears saunter down Main Street
sending station wagons crashing into fire hydrants,

getting the police department to phone
for tranquilizer guns,

the dart going by accident into the
neck of the unpopular police chief,

who is carried into early retirement
in an ambulance crowned with flashing red lights,

as the bears inherit the earth,
full of water and humans and garbage,

which looks to them like paradise.

After five months of active looking, and a total of three offers on various houses, amber_phoenix, longueur, and I finally bought a house yesterday. I'm alternately elated and weirdly blase about it. There's something about the process having taken so long that makes it a little hard to wrap my head around it being real.

For all that the overall process took a long time, the process on the house be bought yesterday FLEW. We went from offer to closing in less than a month!

I'm really delighted with the house, which is a sweet single family in Union Square, Somerville. I'm super excited that we found a good fit in Somerville, which I feel really invested in, and I can hardly wait to have people over. It sort of has to wait until I move, though, which happens on Saturday. Phew!

Naturally, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to leave my current digs. I've lived at UDL for 8 1/2 years, which is longer than I've lived anywhere but the house I grew up in. If I live in new-and-unnamed-house for as long, I'll be almost 45 when I cross that milestone.

When I moved into UDL ...
* it was named "The Vatican", not Undisclosed Location
* I was dating shayde
* I had hair down to my butt
* I was just settling down after almost a year of international and cross-country travel
* I was unemployed
* The house cat was Gearbox

While I lived at UDL ...
* I cut more than 12" off my hair
* We got another roommate, named Olivia
* I got a job at Campbell-Kibler Associates
* Olivia brought home a consolation kitten after the second time GWB was elected
* Olivia brought home a stray cat, now known as Kitteh
* I stopped dating shayde
* Olivia moved out
* I started dying my hair
* fraterrisus moved in
* I got into and started attending grad school
* I started dating spike
* I quit my job at CKA
* I graduated from grad school
* I got a job at WalkBoston
* I quit my job at WB
* I got a job at athenahealth
* I bought a house

And that's just a few self-centered highlights! 8 1/2 years is a long time, and a lot happened in that time. I feel like a pretty different person from when I moved in, and it's been a super great place to call home for all that time.

It makes me both nostalgically sad to look back at all that and know I'm moving on, and excitedly anticipatory and happy to look ahead at what might be coming next. Life is so full of surprises.

Today, I'm thankful for having and exercising choices in difficult times. I have discovered time and again how much a sense of choice, even if I never exercise it, makes the difficult times and things in my life easier. When I give myself permission to take the easy way out if I really, really want to, most of the time, the mere sense that I have an option makes it more possible, more bearable, to put my head down and do the right thing.

And, of course, there are times when I exercise that choice, when I take the easy way out of something, and I don't beat myself up over it. This is an amazing gift to be able to give myself, and an important one.

My experience of sometimes buckling down and sometimes exercising the escape clause makes it all the more powerful to know that I truly am making my experience bigger by having choices at all. These choices make me who I am, and make my life my own.

I've had a series of big -- potentially huge -- conversations this week, unexpectedly. I left work early and am home cooking, listening to music that makes me feel, and thinking about life, the universe and everything. I have that feeling I get at the beginning of a big experience, of potential, openness, "something's about to happen". I'm afraid and impatient at the same time. Nothing's going to change, but everything's going to change ... soon.

Today's wisdom:

I'd rather have the uncomfortable conversation than the uncomfortable silence; the conversation might get me somewhere.

In my recent longing for warmer weather, I've also found myself experiencing the deep nostalgia for Guatemala in general and Xela in particular that I get from time to time. It's nearly three years since I've been there, and though I've vaguely kept up on the news from the school by way of Claudia, my friend and former teacher, and who I see whenever I get to San Francisco, it's a far cry from being there. Mango season starts in a couple of weeks, and how much would I love to walk up to the market and buy myself a handful of Rosita mangoes (an actual variety) and sit on the crazy tall curb to eat them in the sunshine?

Maybe it's because I feel like so much is up in the air and the temptation to flee the country again is awfully strong. It worked so well last time as a way to change my life, and as a big project, it was great. Of course, a good argument could be made that grad school is certainly a great, big project, and there's a strong possibility that in a few years, I'll look back on it, too, as a life-changing event, if somewhat less dramatic. But that doesn't change my desire now to dash off to a more immediate and viscerally exotic locale.

Day to day things there were really hard. One of the things I remember when I got back to the US is going out to run errands and finding myself practicing the things I'd need to say for various interactions at the bank, post office and grocery store, before realizing that they would all be in English, and, you know, I didn't need to make sure before going in that I knew all the right words. It's a little weird to say I want things to be hard in that way for a while, in part because the ways things are actually hard for me these days are so very differently hard. But, really, I think it's just that running away right now sounds pretty nice.

The whole time I was working at Harvard, I was really focussing my energy on other aspects of my life. I was really clear about that all along. It was a great job because the coworkers were fun, and interesting, and because the hours were flexible enough that I could live my life without a lot of interruption from my job. It was fabulous to have, after spending all my years before that in school, a job that I left at the office and really didn't think about again until I was back IN the office.

I thought this meant that I wasn't interested in building a career and that, for me, work was the facilitator to the rest of my life: ie, earning money so I could do the things I like to do, and the job not getting in the way in the meantime.

Now that I'm back in the space of actively looking at what I want to do next, I'm finding that I DO want a job that engages me. I don't want a job that takes over my life, but I don't want to just get a job that earns the money I want but doesn't SING to me. I want to use my brain and do something interesting. I really want to be doing something that feels like contributing to a solution rather than work for The Man.

But I don't know exactly what I want to do, how I want to do it, etc. And it's frustrating to feel totally uninterested in 99% of the jobs that I see out there. What I would dearly love would be to be able to separate the money issue from the work issue. If I were independently wealthy, my choices would be much simpler. (Or, more likely, the complicated choices would be in a different realm entirely, but I'm willing to give it a shot.)

Given that I'm unlikely to win a lottery any time soon, especially considering my two-tickets-a-year average, I should probably figure out where to go, and what to do, next. Part of me would love to settle back in Boston and reconnect with my community there. Another part of me just saw an interesting job in Mexico and thought, "Hey! More challenge! Let's do it!"

It seems pretty clear to me that I'm not ready to stop challenging myself in some fairly big ways, and I'm not sure if that means I need to stop thinking about Boston (or SF?) as my locale for the next year, or if I could satisfy my desire to push myself in the context of home and work in a familiar place.

I'm currently thinking about finding a short term housing option while doing a course on TEFL, which I could then apply to any number of jobs in Latin America (or many other places in the world), which would allow me to be settled for a few months and maybe do more thinking in the meantime. I'm afraid that would put me in my comfy rut, though, and that I would end up in the same place I was last year wondering how I'd gotten into such a comfy and yet strangely unsatisfying place.

There are so many places I'd like to go, and things I'd like to do, I hate feeling constrained by my finances. But in some ways, travelling to some of the places I'd like to go would make me less constrained by money, as cost of living in those places is much less than the US, and certainly Boston. And I could do a lot of things I'd like to do in those places...

But is that just putting off the inevitable necessity of finding a real job and acting like a grown up?

Perhaps I can find some other circles to wander around just to add some variety to my circular thinking.