It was March, 1992, and I had life all figured out.
As a recent college graduate, I’d landed a good job in the Southern California town where I already lived, and I was planning my wedding to a wonderful man later that summer. The plan for the next phase of life was very simple:
· Work for two or three years,
· Save up some money, and then
· Go to graduate school to get my MBA.
Eventually we would start a family, but for now we were focused on getting our careers established.
Life was going very much according to plan.
On the surface, following the common wisdom seemed to be working: work hard, rack up academic and professional achievements, wait for wealth and happiness to follow. So, for the next decade this was the path I followed, doggedly pursuing the next promotion and the next raise, never missing an opportunity to work harder or pick up the slack whenever someone else needed help. When I found out that some of my colleagues referred to me as a “work horse,” I was proud.
It all felt very noble and right.
There were, however, occasional moments when I had a sneaking suspicion that something was off. Like the time I had to cancel a birthday dinner with my husband to work through the night on a significant last-minute change to a client presentation. Or the Friday evening when I picked up my dog from the boarding facility after returning from a business trip, and realized he had spent more time at the kennel than at our house that month.
It was the “cost of success” I told myself, stuffing the troubled feeling down as I continued to push forward.
A few years later, after I had just turned forty and was working as a program director and adjunct faculty member in the business school of a large research university, I woke up early on a chilly January morning with a sore throat and a fever. I took some cold medicine, and continued my day as planned. The next day I was feeling even worse – couldn’t eat, could barely swallow liquids, and had such severe body chills my teeth were chattering – and nothing seemed to help. I had been trying to work from home, but just sitting and the computer and concentrating had become unmanageable.
I had never felt like this, never been this sick before.
After a visit to the doctor, I was diagnosed with strep throat and Mono. The next few months were awful – my brain was foggy, my joints ached, and I had absolutely no energy. I continued to work anyway, maintaining my heavy workload, trying not to let anyone down, but barely making it through each day. After several months I still wasn’t feeling any better; something had to change.
And everything was on the table.
I began rethinking everything I thought I knew, everything I had been told was true and wise by family, friends, and the culture I grew up in. I asked myself some really hard questions that I’d never thought to ask before:
· Why had I chosen the career path I was on?
· What did I really care about?
· When I was on my death bed, what kind of life did I want to look back on?
I didn’t have answers to any of them. Not good ones, anyway.
My education and career choices had just happened – they seemed like the best options in front of me when someone told me I had to choose. I cared generally about security, like financial security and relationship security, but when I dug deeper, I realized these were just based on fear – the fear of being broke and the fear of being alone. And what did I hope to see when I looked back on my life someday?
This question took a lot of time, and I’m still working on answers today.
My husband and I eventually decided to make some big changes. I quit my job; we sold our house and moved to a different state; we decided to educate our boys at home. Each of these decisions was really, really scary – some days it felt like we were jumping off a cliff with no guarantee of surviving the fall. But continuing our life as it had been wasn’t an option, so we jumped.
And I’m so happy we did.
Looking back on that time, I’m so grateful we were brave enough to completely rethink our lives, to take some big risks. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. That’s not to say it has always been easy – it hasn’t. Everyone we knew questioned what we were doing along the way, sometimes expressed through gentle concern (like our families) and other times through… anger?
Yes, anger. It turns out, some people get mad when you don’t follow “the rules.”
I’ll write more about this in another post because it was a common response when people learned that we were educating our boys at home. There’s a lot to explore there. For now, I’ll just note that when I get this type of response these days, I don’t take it personally. Their reaction is rooted in fear and sadness – it’s about them, not me.
So, now that you’ve read this far, I have to break it to you: I still don’t have everything figured out. I’m still questioning and rethinking many aspects of life. I’ll be writing about all of that here – other changes I’ve made and others I’m considering. But I’ve already learned a few important things that I think are universally true:
· “Common wisdom” does not exist. There’s no bit of wisdom, no set of common beliefs, that works for all of us. We each have to choose which beliefs serve us and which don’t, and then accept that these will likely change over time.
· Good questions are key. The starting point for all of us is asking the right questions – our answers may not come immediately, but we need to keep asking them anyway.
· Bravery is required. Opting out of systems and choosing different paths than those our family and friends believe in is hard. Really hard.
So that’s what “Rethinking Wisdom” is all about – my process of questioning, thinking, and then writing about what I learn. I’m also interested in hearing about and sharing others’ stories, so if you’ve got a story about “opting out”, I’d love to hear it!
(P.S. If you’re interested in reading more about the my experience with illness, I wrote about it in more detail in the article “A Gift of Illness,” published by the HuffPost in 2013.