For the last few Fridays, I have driven the 50 minutes up Hyde Park Road to Ski Santa Fe. It’s a surprisingly awesome little mountain with a good mix of terrain, and it’s cheap ($30 tickets with my season pass!). It’s the kind of ski experience I have wanted my whole life: A local mountain that is close enough to go at lunchtime and ski six or seven good runs then call it a day.
In college, I had arranged my class schedule so I could drive up to Truckee, Calif. on Thursday nights. We’d train on Fridays, race on Saturdays, and then drive home on Sundays. I can’t say it helped my academic career — but it made me a really good skier. Then I didn’t ski for nearly 15 years when I was living in New York City. The mountains were too far away, too cold. I skied more living in San Francisco, but it was a schlep. I still always wanted to live in a ski town.
As I was coming down the mountain last Friday, it dawned on me: Santa Fe is a ski town. I did it.
What do you want?
Natch, this thought led me to another thought about manifesting. A different practice I have undertaken in yoga around is working with a sankalpa, or innermost intention/heartfelt vow. For years, my crude sankalpa, it would seem, was to live in a ski/outdoor town. I wanted it, I longed for it, I tasted it, I took action to make it happen. It fits my joy. Your desires make your reality.
It’s practice that I first came across in yoga master Rod Stryker’s book The Four Desires. It’s a powerful, iterative process of focusing your desires to specific ideas (some emotional, some material) that stem from your “dharma code” or guiding principles for your life’s purpose. There are many things you can do to then manifest your intentions. One of the most important activities is visualizing/embodying the feeling of having the very thing you desire. Another one is finding the shadow desire, or thing that could be holding you back.
Desire > Doubt
My current sankalpa is: “I enjoy my work.”
First, the doubt.
The five years (2015-2020) I spent working in tech in San Francisco burned me out. I felt simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed, hyper-focused and un-focused, stressed but full of the contagious hubris, and like a pawn on the waves of VC-fueled whims. I also learned a lot, met brilliant people, and did good things.
One of my lower professional points should have been my highest—I was interviewing at one of the top VC firms on Sand Hill Road for their editorial team but the low-hum of the electric McLarens and Teslas lining the parking lot, the hand sanitizer in every room (pre-pandemic), the gorgeous art but sterile meeting spaces had the effect of making me feel like Cousin Greg. It was the sound of the creepy, cult-y silence of software eating the world. Money was seemingly on display behind bullet-proof glass that your nose was pushed against. Real human lives seemed very very far away. My lack of enthusiasm to be a handmaiden in this environment became obvious and after three rounds of interviews, we agreed it was not the right fit.
Sidebar: There was a great
interview
between Kara Swisher and Dave Eggers last September that highlighted the discontents of the tech class. In the interview, Eggers says:
Every tech person that I meet…are like the nicest, most idealistic, wonderful people to talk to. … I think everybody’s stuck, to some extent. Once you’re in there, the machine is only going in one direction. So all you can do is, I guess, cash out at a certain point and try to do good with the money that you’ve made. But once you’re in there, I think that individually they are aware of but usually helpless to stop what the company collectively is doing to destroy so much of what matters.
Even though I am a great believer in technology, I was also ready to leave that industry — or least take needed distance — in March 2020. Since then I have been in a contract nonprofit role that has been a gift in many ways but the contract will be over this year. And with the vague outline of The End of the Pandemic forming on the horizon, I am (and we all are) waking up to “What’s next?”
The future of work
Now the desire: I enjoy my work.
There is another chapter to my career, though I am not entirely sure what that will look like. Like many of us, the pandemic changed me. I went deep into yoga, I found love, I have a puppy-child, I packed up my San Francisco home and untethered myself from structures that no longer worked. In short, I think I became a better, kinder person in the last two years.
I toggle between a fantasy where money is no object and I can fully career switch with new training in a healing art vs. the reality that bananas don’t just buy themselves.
In either case, I want to have a new experience of post-pandemic work whether it’s 1:1 or 1:many. Luckily, so does everyone else. So what’s next? While the specific details are unclear as of now, the sentiment is not. I enjoy my work.
I spent my whole career working at a job I didn't enjoy, in a place I didn't really want to be. Many people in my generation (I'm 62) had parents who were deeply scarred by the depression. The mantra I received growing up is you want to find a job with a steady paycheck that's secure. It's not a bad message, practical and completely understandable given that my dad had seen his parents lose their house and farm because they couldn't afford to pay the property taxes. My father who could have gone to school at Princeton on a sports scholarship had to go to work at 17 to help support the family, and ended up working blue collar jobs his whole life. I earned a good living in a rewarding career in engineering, but I was recently reflecting that if I'd made a list of what I wanted to work at, it wouldn't have been in the top 50. I also wanted to be close to the outdoors, and never really did that to date either. I wonder now a lot of "what ifs" about my choices...I'll never know, Cheryl Strayed calls the roads you didn't take in your life "ghost ships"
visions that aren't real. Thoreau advised, find your bone, and gnaw at it with the determination of a dog...pursue your dreams with a passion. I'll always regret not really knowing how it would have gone if I had done that, and what my life would have looked like. I feel like I lived someone else's life...and that's a ship you don't want to be on.
I’m with you. Just this week I decided it was time to figure out my next move. But I don’t want to enter into the riggeurs of job searching only to wind up in a job with a “fast paced environment” and a demanding boss. It’s too much of a gamble.
Instead, I’m trying to network within my own community and see if there isn’t a perfect fit somewhere that I know the people involved and feel good about what they are doing. Something freelance or part-time.
But I don’t yet know what the job is. I know that it isn’t “writing for the New York Times” anymore. But I wonder if it’s something that doesn’t exist yet, and so I won’t be able to manifest it or “job search” for it until I see it out in the wild.
Good luck with your search, and thanks for the reminder to intentionally think about what I want next!