Mixed blessings

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"


Talking Heads - "Once In A Lifetime"

Part of what makes my job enjoyable is that it's so different from what I did for most of my adult life. On the other hand, rarely a day goes by when I don't say to myself, "Wait a second, I'm teaching math? How did that happen?" This can be somewhat disconcerting, as you might imagine. You'd think that after 8 years I would have adjusted somehow to what I do with myself. And of course I have to a great extent. But I am quite sure that the question is still worth asking. How did this happen?

The easy answer is that I got lucky. And there certainly was a lot of luck involved, because the timing of the sale of our family's business could not have happened at a much more advantageous time for me. I was bored with what I was doing and had just started to try to figure out how to gracefully bow out (unlike the first time I left the business, where I just pretty much just rebelled at the way I was being treated and gave my father little choice but to fire me). I know myself well enough to be aware that I have some pretty serious issues dealing with authority, and so when I returned to the business after a few years it was to run a semi-independent unit. That was fun and interesting for a while but had run its course after 10 years. And before I could figure out how to get out, I was out.

This was completely different from any other major transition in my life. Everything else had a run-up and a natural progression: Lower school, middle school, high school, college, job, business school, job, job, married, job, kid,  job, job, kid. But here I was with no next step. It was at once terrifying and exhilarating, and one feature of being in that state is that you tend to focus well, so I was pretty quickly able to break down what I liked and didn't like and what I was good and not so good at. Teaching just made sense and math was the easiest path to it.

That this ended up being more satisfying than everything else I believe was a direct consequence of the process I went through. And if I have any regrets looking back, it's that I didn't go through that kind of self-analysis earlier. It's all water over the bridge, as one of my not-native-English-speaking clients used to say, and I'm pretty happy now. I just think maybe I would have been happier sooner if I'd stopped and thought about what I was doing before I'd done all those other things.

Or maybe not; I'm not sure. It may be that you do what you can when you're ready to do it and not before. If I tried to choose a life path before I was mature enough to make a smart choice, things might have been boring or awful or both. I guess that's why there are so many self-help books, eh? But my personal experience is that trying to self-help before you're ready to help yourself may not be the best plan. So think things through and plan ahead, but go with the flow. That's the best advice I can come up with at the moment.