Work

Whoops, I Lost My identity

08/16/2018 by John 4 Comments

Mary got to bring a big part of her identity with her to New Zealand. I had to leave a large portion of mine behind. This is having more of an effect on me than I thought it would. Or maybe, I never thought that much about it until we got here.

Without the connections I have back in the States, I knew that coming here meant that I would not be able to do the work that I was doing back home. What I did not realize was how deeply entrenched my sense of self was tied into working for Outward Bound and being a bicycle tour guide. Even though for years now I’ve felt that I wanted to move away from those things, I had no idea how much importance I had placed in them to help me define who I am. These roles I played provided me with a sense of self-worth. It’s easy to feel good about yourself when you can tell people you work for the North Carolina Outward Bound School and that you “help people discover more about themselves, others, and the world around them through challenging experiences in unfamiliar settings”.

I am stripped down and now wonder who I am supposed to be now that my costume is gone. I scan through the want ads, questioning what I see. Can I be a personal assistant? A baker? A deckhand for the ferry? How about a customer service representative, a university admissions counselor, or a real estate agent assistant? Could any of these things be me? I think I would like working with computers making beautiful web pages, but I look at the qualifications for those jobs and know that I would never be called for an interview. And after all the cups I have drunk, I don’t even have enough experience to make coffee in this caffeine-crazed town.

I know that a job is not all that defines a person. I call myself a runner, a writer, a husband, and a friend. These things are all well and good so why can’t I just be satisfied with that? Today, I’ll go to work taking orders and making tacos. There will be moments when I will enjoy it and there will be times when I will be wondering why I’m there. But underlying it all will be the question “is this it?” With nearly fifty years of life experience here I am working a barely more than minimum wage job.

I know I will reach the other side of this. I don’t know what I’ll find there or who I will be when I get there. That’s part of the adventure I guess. I know this is one of those times in life when growth will occur, perhaps even a metamorphosis. I am curious to see how it all turns out and what I will be doing a year from now. But in the meantime, the growing pains are difficult as I walk around this new world and wonder who I’m going to be.

It’s A Job

07/27/2018 by John 2 Comments

This week, I started working at an all plant-based Mexican restaurant. Not exactly a dream come true, but it’s a job, and I get paid. I get to move around, interact with people, make delicious food, and get out of the house. It will be fine for now. Who knows, I might actually come to love it.

It’s part of the lifestyle. I’m living in New Zealand. I have to remind myself of that sometimes since it still seems somewhat unreal. Having this job right now is just a small piece of the bigger picture. It helps enable me to be here, living in this wonderful, vibrant city where I can run in the hills and by the sea. It’s a job with flexible hours, even flexible seasons that match the times when I might want to go away so as a lifestyle piece, this might work out just fine.

I need to get back to knowing that a job doesn’t define who I am. It is a means to an end. I don’t need to love my job, as long as it serves me and I don’t serve it. When it starts to feel the other way around, that’s when there is a problem.

Mostly, I am happy to have something to do. Someplace to go. A purpose to my day. It has been so long it seems. I have not worked a day since April. Crazy.

It’s hard going through life without a sense of purpose. But maybe it’s a less complex idea than that. It’s hard to go through life without a place to be, or any responsibilities to anybody other than yourself. You just wake up in the morning and don’t know what to do.

Hard. That’s probably the wrong term for this, isn’t it? Hard would be not being able to work and wanting to. Hard is not being able to feed your family. My life has never been hard.

We’ve been in Wellington for three weeks and we’ve stayed in three different places now. There is a view out over the hills here and we have a little more room to spread out. Still, we will pack our bags one more time before we get into a more permanent lodging situation. We are like a stone skipping across the water. Slowly we are getting closer and closer to coming to a stop and sinking down to rest. Hopefully, we will like where we land.

Living in The Unknown

05/04/2018 by John Leave a Comment

We’ve been out of work and out of an apartment for two weeks now. The car is littered with random shoes, bits of recycling that need to find a home, and pieces of clothing tossed into the back seat while speeding down the freeway as the cool mornings give way to warm spring afternoons. The road thus far has led from Chattanooga to Asheville, Nashville, Huntsville, Sewanee, and back again to Asheville. Soon, the wheels of the Matrix will turn north towards Philadelphia. We don’t know where or when we will have a place to call home again. We are living in the unknown.

New Zealand is so far away that it is tomorrow. That is where we are trying to go: into the future. But in the present, we lie awake at night in other people’s bedrooms wondering if we’ll make it or not. When the morning comes, we expectantly open our email to see if a job offer has landed there and breath a sigh of frustration when we see that nothing has arrived; another day of waiting has just begun.

I sat in the dentist chair yesterday with the hygienist sticking her implements into my wide open mouth, asking me if my wife and I were the “bicycle people”. And though I have not worked a bike tour in close to a year now and my bike is slowly turning to rust in someone’s basement, I grunted an acknowledgment that yes, we were indeed the “bicycle people”. She asked me if I knew how many people would love to trade places with us. I thought about all the sleepless nights we’ve had recently, the confusion over whether or not we are making good decisions, and our bank balance that for the foreseeable future will only be heading in a negative direction. Once her hands were removed from between my jaws and I could again use my full powers of communication to respond, I glanced up at her and said: “there are pros and cons.”