Time to Quit - Again

I'm supposed to be in Chicago. I'm in Michigan. I'm supposed to be sitting in a professional development workshop at the university where I have been on the adjunct faculty for nearly a decade. I love these workshops. I get to interact with my peers, learn new teaching tips, meet new people and generally breathe in the academic air. So why am I not there?

I forgot.

The date was long marked in my calendar. I rsvp'd. I'd thought about how I would get over and back (train? drive?) And when I read an email early this morning from a colleague commenting about the day, I realized that my life was becoming bajiggity again, just when I thought I was beyond it.

Back in the days of my corporate employment, I would wake up in the middle of the night worried about projects that were due. A committed employee, you say? Yes, but the problem was, I wasn't worried about real projects. The project that woke me up were created by my anxious, bajiggity mind playing the trick of adding one more thing to my to do list. Then I would panic even more about the real ones I had on my plate. While some people seem to thrive on it, stress was definitely NOT my friend.

Since walking away from the corporate world for the last time in the early 1990's, I've chosen a life that was determinedly NOT bajiggity by my definition. To pay the bills I created a "mosaic" of jobs - tiny little gigs pieced together to provide just enough and sometimes not quite that. But I said I would bag groceries before I went back into the pressure cookers I'd left behind. Admittedly for some people the uncertainty of where the next bit of income would come from would be far worse than being in a job that drove you to distraction. Not me. We choose our poisons and choose where we draw our lines in the sand.

So I see in today's forgotten workshop a hint of the kind of behavior that was my everyday life all those years ago. And I know what to do. It's time to quit - again. Its time to refocus and, if necessary, recreate what holds meaning in my life and leave behind those things that don't anymore. While it's sad to think about leaving behind what made me "me" for this part of the journey, I know I can't get further without dropping some things and freeing my hands to discover and pick up what's next.

It occurs to me that this sounds like the opposite of the idea of "bloom where you are planted" but I can reconcile the two. It is about adapting to the world around you and the place where you are in your life rather than trying (in vain) to be someone that you aren't. And since you don't stop becoming who you are til you die, it's a process of discovery. Sometimes going deeper, sometimes wider. I think I'm heading for some deeper waters at the moment.