#quittingjob

So as many of you know and most of you don’t, I have been on crazy emotional and spiritual roller coaster in the physical plane we call life. I have moved around multiple times, jumped jobs multiple times-whether quitting to go find myself in the foreign exotic country of Thailand or abruptly quitting with no notice because it didn’t feel right or most recently, having been fired from a job that caused me true unhappiness and spiritual poverty and turmoil. Now from the front page I understand all of this sounds a little crazy but if you knew the behind the scenes where I constantly meditate, constantly dream, and consistently plan and idealize ways to bring light, love and joy to not only my life but other peoples’ lives  as well you would understand a little bit more of why things have happened the way they have. I think of myself to be a fairly peaceful, somewhat enlightened, joy and love-oriented person. And to me, I see the world this way too. I see the world, the universe, the god, the one energy that moves through us all as loving, giving, and above of all- one of the best listeners I have ever had the chance to connect with. Have you ever had a thought of something and immediately that something shows up? I mean like that time you thought of an old friend you haven’t spoken with in a while and then they magically send you a text the next day? Or like when you have a moment fantasizing about chocolate and peanut butter and in the next hour someone offers you a peanut butter cup? That to me is that universe/god energy. It is the energy that is always there and is always listening and always answering and always giving.

So for you to understand where I am going with this I need to backtrack a bit. Starting with my most recent job which I will leave unnamed (just because I had a “bad” experience there does not in any shape or form mean it is a bad place). This was a place I had worked before and had come back to- hoping it would be different, hoping I would be different. However that wasn’t the case, I really truly gave it my all- I tried to vibrate out of it, I tried to change my perspective on it but I for some reason really just could not appreciate my time there. I always felt as if I was underappreciated, as if I was out of place, as if I just really was not meant to be there or even wanted there. So things there started to get rough. I would spend all my time outside of work dreading the time I would go into work. I tried everything I possibly could to get myself even relatively grounded, balanced, energetic, happy and positive to go into these shifts. Every shift I never failed to show up unhappy, unfulfilled, ridden with anxiety and forcing a smile. I constantly had an inner struggle of putting myself down for still being there and then trying to pull myself back up to be “normal” and do the “right thing” and to just be happy. But I just couldn’t shake it. Every week I would break down crying, swearing to quit, swearing not to go back in, swearing to find another job (and constantly looking for another job) but never following it through. Then it actually began to show in my work- I had one thing happen after another and another. And then on my last night, I was sent home early. 

I went to my therapist the next day to talk about the frustration and the hard time I had been having at work. I went to her to talk about the meeting I had been called in to have with my manager later that day, where in the pit of my stomach I knew I was either quitting or I was getting fired. After talking through the moments that I had guests complain about- I came to realize that underneath all of the trials and hard times I had had at work- I had a foundational feeling of not feeling enough, not being enough, and doubting my own self value. 

My eyes were opened. I understood and saw myself and my actions as a case self-insecurity, self-doubt and true confusion and loss in the real value of who I am. I had created an entire story based around my character at work. I went into every shift feeling like I was not enough and that therefore created more of that story in my mind, highlighted and twisted things said or things done at work into this story to amplify and solidify it and on top of that, it also attracted people treating me that way. Once I realized this that day with my therapist- my entire perspective on my experience at this workplace shifted. I realized I had created my own mental prison. I trapped myself in, no one else did it to me but me. I understood the lesson. I understood and I grew. Finally the golden cuffs had been broken, the dark cloud had turned into sunshine and I had become liberated from a false story I had created to become true. And the moment this all shifted for me, was the moment I felt myself elevate out of it. It seemed the lesson I needed to go there to learn was finally learned and I could be free from the pain I had created.

So, I was fired. My manager brought me in that day to let me go and the universe led me to that day to allow ME to let go and grow. So yes, some may see this as a wicked punishment, but I see it as the blessing I had been asking for.  The universe was listening and it gave me my answer. At this moment, I understood, at this moment everything became clear and the agonizing grip on my heart, my mind and my soul was released and I was free to move on. 

I am free. I am liberated. I have been asking the universe so long to send me a sign, to send me a way to a new job, or show me the path to get somewhere else other than where I was and because I never had quite enough courage to quit, the universe/god did it for me. And now I have the space for something bigger and better to grow in my life- the space I have been asking for. Now the question is, what will I do with it?

I’m ready to find a job I feel gives to the world. I am ready to find a job I feel joy and love in. I’m ready to find a job that not only fulfills me but helps me give to others in a bigger way than just serving out cheeseburgers and beers. I am truly ready to radically change my life and I am ready to hold out for something bigger and better than I have ever had. So as I go on, applying for jobs I have little to no experience in because I am shifting away from what I’ve known my whole life- I hold on. I hold onto faith, I hold onto my trust in the grander schemes of life and I hold onto the deep understanding that this is just the start of the many blessings to come. 

We’ve all lain in the grass and made shapes out of the clouds, but we all, even children, know that the dragon and the airplane we perceive through the cotton-candy nimbus is entirely in our mind. How is it that our philosophical tradition has been so absorbed into our consciousness that we now struggle to envisage an objective world in which such constructive opposites merely serve as abstract mental tools that falter without differentiation and don’t actually exist in their own right.  We are thus baited. Because, of course, where polarizing forces exist, there is a choice; there is a preferred homeostasis, a nine-to-five “Honey, I’m home” where the dinner’s always on the table and mortgage forecloses freedom. Therefore, a world constructed on this basis will forever be in turmoil, ever battling to understand and to dominate some aspects of the linear in-between. 

I recently gave notice to my employer.  The decision has been a long time a’coming. Partially my reticence was born out of fear of losing a paycheck, or fear of what happens next, but also the fear is ultimately tied to the idea of who/(what?) I have become that has been building up over the years…: an idea inherently based on seemingly archetypal battles such as rich vs. poor, employed vs. unemployed.  The decision to quit, to bow out, to dip my toe into the unknown, represented another battle, but one which finally made an enemy of these wrinkled and incontinent dualisms. At the point of deciding, and after ruminating on it, I wondered whether my choice was based on sanity or insanity. I felt like I was either going completely mad, or was making the single most mature and responsible decision of my life. I am pretty certain that my decision was both as irrational and as logical as it gets. I have little time for regret or intellectual ass-wiping.

 People have nay-sayed, or otherwise steered me away from the decision I made for various reasons. I am well paid, I enjoy the leisure of working from home and flexible hours. And yet the unseen weight and stress of the job I was doing, the invisible dream-killing distraction of it all justified this most vertiginous of decisions. I lived in a world - the legal world - in which the “idea” must be fully justified, punctuated, hammered out and convenienced in such merciless conceit. I realize that the world I would rather live in is one in which ideas are given the freedom, like children, to stutter and to fail, to stumble and to fall, to shit their pants after their parents fail to differentiate between the cry for attention and defecation.Not all ideas are bound for glory, not all stand the test of logic. And yet, the very clear evidence of the power of the placebo surely shows us that belief can marshal great potential and harness untapped strength in the human spirit. Unchecked, sure, it is dangerous beyond words, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be encouraged. The very same splitting of the atom gave rise to the world’s most powerful weapon, and at the same time, one of the more promising energy sources we have at our disposal. The ocean is beautiful, blue, swimmable and life-affirming, but it will swallow us whole without a second thought. 

Sometimes we need to dive into the big blue. We daren’t do so because we’ve read about sharks. Sometimes we need to travel everywhere to expand our minds. We daren’t do so, because there are ethnic cultures who hate us and threaten the core of our existence.  Sometimes we just want to eat salmon. We daren’t because it’s contaminated with the mad-hatters tonic. You know what, maybe we should and to goddamned hell with conventional wisdom.

In the past 2 years, I got divorced, I saw my mum commit suicide, my dad suffer a stroke…life has made its brevity and fragility painfully obvious and I refuse to wake up a single day without wanting to leap out of bed into the arm’s of a life that fills me with joy.  

In the past few months, literature, life-experience, pure unadulterated and ravishing coincidence have presented me with the compelling truth that life is a wish-fulfilled by an open heart, that intentions can be felt by animal and plant alike oceans apart, that the beauty of life can, should, must be shared in art….and it will save us all.