Yesterday was the five year anniversary of the very last day I, “worked for the man”. The day I gathered the last of my things from my desk and left the job I had for almost a quarter of a century for the final time. I was quite proud of myself that I actually went through with it. You see, I had turned in my termination notice to Securian’s human resources department about a month earlier and almost chickened out and told them it was a mistake no less than six or seven times.
As much as I grumbled about having to juggle a corporate job and a writing career, leaving everyone and everything that was familiar to me was scary. I saw my co-workers almost like family and the job as a huge financial safety net. When you’re in the moment, maybe because of the feelings of fear and all the other human emotions, it’s impossible to experience the real truth of it.
We tend to see things how we wish them to be and not so much as they really are.
My last day in that office was all the confirmation I needed that I made the right decision. Deli food and pastries were placed in an empty cubicle and many people grazed on it all day and dropped by to say their quick obligatory goodbyes enroute back to their desks. Except for a handful of people, no one really seemed to care much that I was leaving. In the five years that I’ve been gone an even smaller group has bothered to reach out to check in or maintain any kind of contact whatsoever.
Life is a series of illusions that fall away one by one.
We all have some kind of preconceived notion about how important we are to other people and how these kinds of milestones in life will play out. These co-workers were people I spent more time with than my family. These were people I celebrated birthdays with, we went to funerals together, watched our children grow up, celebrated successes, and mourned defeats.
I guess the point I’m trying to make in all this is how important it is, to see things as they really are and not how we wish them to be. It’s so important to breathe, be still and really think deeply about how we spend the moments of our lives. How and who we spend our time with shapes our destinies more than anything else. As we get older and realize how precious the time we have left I see nothing that is more important than this. In the end it can mean the difference between achieving your dreams or not, happiness or a lifetime of disappointment.
I think, at least on some level, most of us already know these kinds of truths but choose to believe those comfortable illusions in life because it’s just easier than facing our fears. Kind of like swallowing the blue pill of contented ignorance in the film The Matrix.
I took the blue pill for most of my life but one day I didn't. I can't even tell you why, it certainly wasn't courage. Maybe the stars just aligned? Maybe I was just tired and finally ready to face the fact there was another choice? I don't know. No matter what the "why" was, I'm glad it happened.
Yes, it’s scary and it isn’t always comfortable to take the red pill but it will take you places that you won’t believe. The decision to leave that place has opened the door to opportunities and experiences I never could have imagined five years ago. As difficult as navigating this new life has sometimes been I would never want to go back to my old one. That old life seems a million miles away now, and almost seems like a dream. Looking back I realize that, as hard as that first red pill was to take, a lifetime of regret would have been an even more difficult thing to swallow.
Be well, live boldly, and take chances.
~Eric Vance Walton~
(Gif sourced from Giphy.com.)
Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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