I didn't start out to be a workaholic. At 18, when grilled by my future mother-in-law about my career aspirations ("If my daughter marries you, you'll drag her the the bottom of the social heap, and any offspring you have will become millstones around her neck."), I replied, "I plan to be the best husband and father I possibly can be; it doesn't matter if I work as a garbage collector or a stock broker, as my career will only serve as window dressing for who I am and what I do."
Somewhere along the path in the next 15 years, I lost my way. My moral and entrepreneurial compass spun wildly whenever I searched for a direction, and I slogged through jobs that sent me home unhappy and unsure of who I was, unable to take a stand when employers threatened my imagined financial/social security and demanded I kowtow to their authority, defer to their dictates of process and relations with customers and vendors. I tried to resolve conflicts with my values and the various demands of my employers by working harder and longer.
It didn't work. I became more and more frustrated and tired, but I couldn't resolve my search for real meaning in my work by just keeping my head down and working harder to please my boss.
Looking back, I realize now that it wasn't because the people I worked for over the years weren't necessarily bad or misguided (although some definitely were) that I wasn't getting any satisfaction from my work. I wasn't taking responsibility for choosing my own path in life. I wasn't totally aware of what mattered most to me, and so I wasn't protecting and nurturing what was essential to my own growth and happiness. The garden of my life was full of random plantings of things I didn't really want or need, and it was full of weeds that sucked up essential resources and threatened to choke out the important stuff. I had no reserve of the things essential to promoting healthy and vigorous growth, and I suffered with shortages at harvest time. Worse, all of this chaos and suffering devolved onto my wife and sons.
I knew, and had experienced, much better. For the first seven years of my life as an independent adult, I had learned to garden and farm organically. I mastered the art of making compost. I made plants and animals grow heartily, and I was healthy, strong, and happy.
Then I forgot how. That's another story.
Remembering, recovering and adding to to all the lost knowledge of my "salad days" is what this blog is going to focus on. I will add my thoughts to this verbal compost pile, and let the resulting "ruminations" nurture and protect a different kind of garden: a legacy of experience, of failures and successes. The Chinese have a saying I dearly love:
"He who learns from his mistakes is a wise man. In contrast, he who learns from the mistakes of others is a happy man."
Compost is amazing, a miracle of life infused into what we once thought of as trash. So, too, are the thoughts and experiences I will leave on this blog: not too valuable until they have fermented awhile in the compost pile of rumination about meaning, purpose, and intentions for the future.
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