So
where does this leave me? I don’t know. I may come back to Alabama, I may stay
here, or I may go somewhere else completely. Whatever job I take and whatever
journey my life is about to begin, I am going to carry with me the lessons from
this job. I am going to find something that I am passionate about and pursue it
with all the fervor and gusto that my head never knew my heart craved. I’ll
pick up my pen and see where it leads me, knowing that my passion for
expressing my ideas has never abated. For I know where my talents reside, and I
know the man I am about to become. “Follow your heart,” they say…only this
time, I am actually going to do it.
Surely an idealist must have written
these words. A man burdened by neither fear nor trepidation and whose reluctance
to end such a seminal chapter in his life was tempered with the expectation of
better days to come. The man who wrote these words must have expected a bright
future, one in which the trappings of success would finally yield to that
higher calling which only a willed countenance and driven passion can preserve.
What becomes of men like this, men who hold such lofty ideals that alight
passions of both the heart and mind? Do they realize their dreams or do they
fall into disillusionment, drowning in the waters of mediocrity that wash over the
world.
I wrote those italicized words four
years ago...to the day. You can look through my archived posts and see for
yourself. At the time I had just been laid off from Diamond Properties, a
budding career cut short by the indiscretions of a boss whose treacherous
schemes rivaled that of any Bond villain. Although I was disappointed to have
lost my first job, I was also inspired by a sense of the limitless world of
possibilities that lay before me. No longer was I tied to a desk job that I
loathed. No longer must I drag myself to an office only to watch the slow hand
of the clock tick drudgingly forward. No longer would I also collect a
paycheck, but at last I digress. A real opportunity was before me, an
opportunity that I am ashamed to admit I wasted. No great risks were taken. No
great passions indulged. Instead I let countless months pass before I even
found another job and then fell back into the same routine I had strived so
desperately to escape from. The trappings of success had bound me once again
and yet I had nothing to show for it.
Fast forward four years. I got laid
off...again...today. This one I have known about for some time and have had
ample time to prepare for, a luxury I was not afforded when first I walked down
this road. When I arrived home today after my final day of work, I revisited my
old post and ruminated over those words I had written all those years ago. The
man who wrote them was certainly an optimist, a great voyager unafraid to raise
his sails so that the winds of change might cast him mightily forward. He was
an adventurer in search of faraway lands, an artist with an empty canvas before
him and a brush in his hand. Now, as I sit here four years later without any
great adventures to recount or masterpieces to behold, I wonder...has he
disappeared?
He has not. Instead, he has merely
gotten four years older, but in some ways hopefully wiser. My passion is still there, a love for the written
word and the spectacular worlds it can create. But there is something more now.
A specific outflow of this passion into a tangible project which has a real
chance of changing my life for the better. It is a project I have been working
on for a year now and is finally coming together in the way I always hoped it
would. If you'll forgive the ambiguity, it is something that I have only shared
with a select few, one of whom dances with me in the ballroom I am creating and
doesn't even know it.
Though uncertainties still abound with
the loss of my job, a few things remain certain. I will never work in an office
again. I will finish this project before taking another job, devoting myself
fully to its completion lest it forever becomes my white whale. And one more
thing, I am moving back to Washington DC, a city I never should have left but
which fate deemed necessary for reasons I am only now beginning to fully
understand. I have some unfinished business to take care of in that city,
business that may yet lead me back out onto the ballroom floor. I do so hope she will
accept my invitation when I ask her to dance.
