How to Ride the Wave

It was the fourth dive of my trip and the tenth dive of my life. Visibility was spotty, and combined with my slug like grace 14m under the blue, blue ocean it was turning out to be a tiring and mildly boring dive. 

The instructor gestured for us to head back towards the boat. Not much use hanging around when we could barely see our hands in front of us. It was only after a couple of minutes of flailing about that I realised that everyone else was doing exactly the opposite. There was a strong current which luckily for us, was moving in the very direction that we wanted to go. As experience amply showed, all the other divers stopped moving and focused on breathing evenly. This ensured that they retained neutral buoyancy, conserved energy (and consequently oxygen), all the while moving towards their destination. 

I thought of this incident today, while contemplating the seesawing nature of my once predictable life. It was wake up, get ready, work, work, work, get home, sleep, sleep, sleep. Then it's weekend and soon it's Monday. So wake up, get ready, work, work, work, get home, sleep, sleep, sleep. Then it's weekend and soon it's Monday. For 7 years (I know that many people have done this for 23, 53, 60 years. For me 7 is a lot in a way that half yearly anniversaries are celebrated by the newly married.) I recall the ups and downs of work life, good one day, disastrous the next, snooze worthy on most days. Post my 6th year, I learnt the hard way (and thanks to A's brutal advice) that getting all worked up over every small blip on the excitement screen was a wasteful expense of energy. Growing older helped. As did losing sleep. What I detested the most was my overall powerlessness in making or breaking these things. Hard work rarely determined the output. Neither did sincerity, saving for a rainy day and calling wolf. These sound pathetically naive to me now, but at that time I was out of options. 

There are so many things I want to do, starting with determining how I spend my time. I want to be on time, no, 5 minutes early to meetings, movie shows and family dinners. I want to read sleazy romance novels for 30 minutes everyday before sleeping, in the warm comfort of my bed. I want to create something with my impossibly high standards; something perfect in my eyes. Then I want to share it with the people who really want to see it simply because they are curious, not because they are being paid to or because they accepted my meeting request when they were high on self importance. I want to write of course. 

Nothing can get me as close to what I want as I would like, whether in a controlled environment like a workplace, or out of it. Not by doing it my way, at least. Each day is a like a wave in the ocean. It comes from somewhere deep inside the world, created by many tiny thoughts and actions each adding up to the curve. It it continuous, day after day, but no wave is alike. I cannot determine the wave that would lap at my feet or prevent it from sinking me under. But I can ride it. Take steady breaths, achieve neutral buoyancy, and drift with the current. 

Put Everything at Stake

When I recently completed two busy years at my ex employer, my LinkedIn inbox flooded with ‘congratulatory’ emails. You know, the one that LinkedIn has so thoughtfully penned so that we can just hit the ‘Send’ button instead of actually typing something useful, or god forbid, personal. 

After limboing for more than two weeks, I finally updated my current position on LinkedIn to a savvier version of ‘unemployed’. In case you are searching your ignorant brain, it is ‘Independent Consultant’. By that time I had lost the rest of my sparse bravado and was sweating at how my established and much secure peer group would react at this coup de idiocy.  Now, LinkedIn’s profile format mandates that we enter the name of the company we are working at, so I checked the only option that I was prompted - ‘Self Employed’. So now I am, if one had to make a sentence out of this as we would of any full time job, independently working at employing myself. 

Then I forgot to toggle the button that proclaimed ‘yes, publish an update to my network about my profile changes’ before making said edits. Might as well shout out my potential pennilessness to the world. Que sera sera and all that. 

Before barrelling into the much anticipated self flagellation on this seemingly unreasonable decision, I agreed with myself that I now had a lot at stake. I had given up my only source of regular income (not to mention the emotional security of a job and all its attendant benefits like free lunches), so I owed it to myself to make better use of my time. If I squandered this period of my life I would have no one else to blame but myself, for a change. If one turned this statement around (the mathematical equivalent of its contradiction being true if a statement was true) it would be that employed management professionals in the mid-senior level have notoriously less to lose. I have a weakness for Victorian era stories, so I see a strong parallel here. During the late 1890s, the aristocracy ruled most of Britain. They had so much wealth - immovable assets like land and farms which generated income - that maintaining it was in itself a lifelong job. While a few exceptions multiplied their holdings and therefore their wealth, a large majority lived a life of decadence: singing, dancing and wining their lives away. The ton, as this set was fashionably called, was known for its unforgiving attitude towards anyone who crossed the line of propriety in any form. To me the only plausible explanation for this uselessly rigid behaviour was that they had so much of material comfort, that the only thing that mattered anymore was their reputations.

To cut to the present, whenever I have socialised with my peer group, the only thing that has mattered was where everyone was working. What was earlier a vocal exclamation of pleasant surprise and not a little envy (because I had worked at what was viewed as a 'happening startup'), now I see a casual shrug and a not so covert move away towards someone with whom they can do corporate speak, and maybe further their 'network'. 

It is no surprise therefore, that more than 12 hours after I mistakenly told my LinkedIn network my new job, my inbox remains bereft of congratulatory messages. Here’s my vote for a message template that reads: “Congratulations on following your true calling. Hope you have fun and write about it someday.”