It has been a while since I last posted an entry on this site. It has been a while since I have done a lot of things, actually.
Swimming… the last time I donned a swimsuit was for the Half-Vineman, and before that, not since the San Jose International Triathlon.
Cycling… my trusty Cervelo has turned into my rusty Cervelo since I have hardly taken it out of hibernation from the garage. If not for teaching spin class at the gym I would have logged zero saddle time in the last two months.
Running… I should have worn through my summer pair of Asics by now. Instead, they still have a few hundred miles to go before a trade-in.
I have been lethargic with other activities as well.
I used to spring out of bed minutes before my alarm rang. Now I find that the “grumble and mumble stretch” to turn the dang thing off – or, increasingly, to hit the snooze one, two, even three times before finally dragging myself up and out of bed – is the only morning stretch I have been doing lately.
I still lay out my running gear before going to bed with the idea that it will inspire me (or make me feel guilty) enough to go for a pre-workday run. But I no longer even hesitate to step over the pile on my way to the shower anymore.
Before retiring for the night, I used to prepare a treasure trove lunch box for the next day filled with fancy salads and well-balanced organic goodies. Lately, however, I have been grabbing handfuls of turkey jerky, trail mix, and hastily slapped-together sandwiches of peanut butter and honey.
Even dinner time is blah. I used to enjoy my time in the kitchen and appreciated the effort it took to concoct an appetizing and interesting menu. Instead, over the last few weeks, I increasingly find myself reaching into the freezer in hopes of pulling-out an easy-to-prepare Trader Joe’s entrée.
I have been in a deep funk even at work.
I used to do a great little routine at both midmorning and mid-afternoon: calf raises, dips at my desk, neck rolls and shoulder shrugs, ab crunches, and miscellaneous stretches, pulls and movements to keep me loose and limber throughout the day. During the last few weeks, however, I catch myself looking at my watch at what is invariably never a few minutes off from 10:00 a.m. or 2:30 p.m. and think “Get moving, J.R.! Time to stretch out. You’ve been lazy all day. Let’s go!”
I sit up a little straighter and become aware of my posture, but I remain seated at the computer or attached to the phone.
I used to read on my lunch break, political biographies, usually, though I was rediscovering the pleasure of indulging in fiction. (In my “I know everything years” of adolescence, I came to the silly and unfounded conclusion that literature was less important than stories of reality.)
Last month, however, I traded Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi — which I was only half-way through — for Outside Magazine. (I never retire a book to the bookshelf before reading it cover-to-cover.)
I have been zoning out with increasing regularity recently.
During the last few weeks I have stopped reading all together and have instead been using my lunch hour to take a nap.
I used to keep my office door open so as to present an inviting environment if someone happened to be walking by and wanted to chat. I also enjoyed the general hum of “getting business done” throughout the department: the almost rhythmic (at least constant) tapping of keyboards and ringing of phones, as well as the water-cooler exchanges between colleagues during the slower times of the day. Throughout the last few weeks, however, I have started the workday by closing my door behind me when I enter my office.
I find myself in a deep malaise even when it comes to social opportunities. I have never been tardy to respond to my emails and calls from friends. But my inbox is stacked with unreturned messages from two months ago, and unless it is Lauren or my family who is ringing me, I have otherwise stopped answering my cell phone.
***
A very good friend of mine from college, Ali, offered the following response upon reading one of my entries, “Doing What I Am Not Supposed To Do,” a few months ago:
I’m not quite sure what to make of, or how to communicate my reaction regarding your most recent post, “Doing What I’m Not Supposed To Do.” It is the most honest, the most revealing of your entries thus far. It also made me ask, “What are you running from?” It is a clue to some greater psychological yearning. You want to be completely unrestrained. What, or who, is restraining you?Of course you are restrained by a training log, by time, by a work schedule and deadlines… but what else? There is something greater there pushing you… and I could feel it… but I don’t know what it is.
There is a distinct difference between running toward something and running from something. And I can’t decide which one applies to you. It’s probably a little bit of both. You’ve always been a bit conflicted: Fueled with hope for the future and saddened by those who have disappointed you in your life. A social-savvy extrovert who also covets his “J.R.-time” where you indulge in silence. A romantic idealist who is both grounded and frustrated by his observations of human nature.
You are trying to communicate a sense of happiness and freedom in this post, but it is saddled with sadness. What is going on in your life? In your head? In your heart?
I do not know how to answer Ali’s questions.
***
In May of 2004, Dr. Joseph DiGioia, President of Georgetown University, shook my right hand and in my left placed a diploma declaring me a Bachelor of Arts in the fields of Philosophy and Government. With this handshake President DiGioia offered his congratulations and I accepted the tremendous responsibility that comes from being a member of an elite and privileged club.
During a ceremony that served as the first bookend of my time at Georgetown, New Student Orientation three years earlier, my classmates and I were told that only 1/100th of 1% of the world’s population has access to an education at a major research institution. The implication: study hard and make us proud by doing good in this world.
Little more than 18 months removed from graduation I wonder: Am I doing good? Am I giving the most that I can to make this world a better place? Am I proud of myself?
As a scrawny teenager I critically wrestled for the first time with the universal questions of who I am and what I want to do with my life. I rarely pretended to know with certainty that I had myself, let alone life, entirely figured out. But I always stood proudly as someone who was self-assured enough to know what motivates me: the desire to leave the world a better place than I entered it, and to measure meaning and fulfillment not with an economic vocabulary, but by the number of people who remember my name as someone who touched their lives for the better.
And yet…
As a 22 year-old I did something even the 12 year-old me told myself never to do: I accepted a job, in part (but mostly), because of the paycheck it provides.
Nearly a year has passed since and I have a routine, but not a day goes by in which I wonder if I am fulfilling my purpose. When I leave my office at the end of the workday, and consuming me on my drive to the gym and then back home and then over dinner until I finally drift to sleep, is the rhetorical question: “Was this the best use of my 8, 9, 10 hours today – sitting at a desk, talking on the phone, typing on the computer, all to help a $1.2 billion company become a $1.4 billion company?”
Yes, the older me has obligations that the younger me could never comprehend (insurance, rent, food, student loans). Life is expensive.
And the older me understands the wisdom of a poster my parents had given me before heading off to college. It a was a picture of an elephant standing on one leg atop a beach ball; written underneath were the words, “Balance is the key to life.” I work so that I can afford a certain lifestyle outside of my job. But does work have to be something that leaves me so spiritually empty? At what point do my justifications for working a particular job become a rationalization for accepting mediocrity?
***
I wrote all of the above three weeks ago. Since then I have come to understand that various moments in life yield incredibly different perspectives on one experience.
When I first started with Company X I brought with me the same sense of optimism, excitement, and idealism for my new job that I had carried with me throughout all other experiences in my life. Not so slowly, however, as I settled into my job, I began to wonder if I was settling in life.
During the interview process I was asked what I am looking for in a job. I said I wanted: (1) to be intellectually stimulated and challenged by the work I do; (2) to be surrounded by people that are better than me so that I can learn from them about how to be a better businessman; and (3) to work in a dynamic and collegial environment. If any of these three qualifications can not be satisfied, I will then look elsewhere for employment, I said.
I was hired, and after six months on the job I revisited my notes from that interview. I assessed my work situation and found that these needs were, in fact, not being met. I then assessed my life situation. I still have many thousands of dollars worth of student loans to repay. I have another six months on the one-year lease on my apartment. I enjoy the little weekend trips that Lauren and I afford ourselves. I have been able to buy some triathlon gear that I was not able to afford in college. And so I decided to stay put.
This is what was bothering me — that I felt I was compromising my values for a paycheck. I was upset with myself and embarrassed. I became restless yet lazy.
Three weeks ago, though, I accepted a new job. I am going to be working with an education nonprofit organization that has developed an incredibly successful program designed to help kids who otherwise lack the resources and support to attend college. These students attend high schools in a district whose dropout rate is 63%. Over 90% of them are considered low-income. And yet, since this organization was founded in 1997, more than 130 of the kids that have graduated from its program have gone on to attend college, a success rate of 100%. I feel truly blessed to have this opportunity to work with so many talented, driven, committed, and passionate people within this wonderful organization.
I feel alive again.
The day after accepting this new job I rose with the sun, an alarm unnecessary to tell me a new day had started.
I slipped on my Asics — which felt like a favorite pair of slippers rediscovered — and went for a 7-mile run.
The next evening I even tried-on my Speedo, just to see I could still squeeze into it after these months of lethargy. (After which, I did a little song and dance routine in front of the mirror to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started In Here.”)
When the weekend came I went for a 4-hour bike ride. When I returned home I cuddled with a blanket in a chair on my porch and devoured the rest The Life of Pi.
No longer exhausted with frustration, I have been cooking and preparing healthy and well-balanced meals, rather than using convenience as the sole criterion in deciding my menu items.
I feel full of hope and happiness again. Inspired.
Over the last three weeks I have been spending most of my free time catching-up and sharing laughs with friends. I am blessed to have such loving and supportive people in my life, friends whose concern for me was so strong that even my “two month-long period of pensiveness and paralysis,” as one college buddy phrased it, did not stop them from checking-in and checking-up with me.
I have come to learn a lot about life, broadly, and myself, specifically, during these conversations of late, the kind of talks that last until 3:00 a.m. and where we share our ideas about how the save the world.
I learned that I should not be embarrassed to be vulnerable with my friends.
I learned that maybe the best way to figure what I want to do with my life is to explore and try new things and realize what I do not want to do with my life.
I discovered that I am not alone in battling the malaise that seems to serve as an initiation into the drastically-different-from-youth-experience known as “The Real World.”
We all express self-doubt sometimes.
Each of my friends – whether serving in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, or pursuing a PhD in Boston, or backpacking around Europe, or teaching English in Japan, or living at home in Ohio, or working at a large consulting firm in New York – shared their own struggles to find a passion in life. Common among us is that we were raised to believe that we can do anything we want to do in this world; we each have the confidence to know that we can change the world. Yet none of us knew with certainty what to do, nor where to go, first.
And thus, over the last few weeks, I have learned to see certain situations through a new lens of optimism.
I have come to appreciate my brief tenure with Company X as a rich and rewarding experience. I was often frustrated by the paper-pushing and politics and Power Point presentations that filled my workday. But I also absorbed an education in business that no MBA program could have provided. I always felt appreciated and part of a team. And in my coworkers I developed some deep, and sure to last, friendships.
At the end of the day I may not have come home feeling like I forever changed people’s live. But over the course of a year this job did forever change mine.
Only because of my time there could I have felt confident enough to pursue this new opportunity.
I feel like I am running now. Not away from something anymore, but towards something new and wonderful. Maybe better yet, I feel like I am running with it… life, that is.
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
