So my full-time gig is closing its doors at the end of the year. Much of what’s happening is being done from an out-of-state Corporate office with not much recent experience on how to close a facility. It makes me wonder about how do you effectively do something that will change so many people’s lives without serious ground-level planning and maybe some experience? So when Corporate doesn’t know, how do you know?
It’s a blessing on one hand, because now I have another opportunity to do what I love to do (writing of course), but at the same time it puts me at the same crossroads I found myself about 3 years ago: how exactly do I get to where I want to go when I inadvertently created my life to lead me somewhere else?
When you set out to a destination, and you realize you’re going the wrong way to get there, you turn around. But it’s so much easier to turn around in a compact car than it is to turn around an 18- wheeler, or even a train. That’s how I feel my career path looks: I am driving the train to get to a destination of a writing career with fulfillment, and I am on a dead-end track in administrative support. I’ve tried several times to engineer a track switch. I’ve radioed in to several station command centers (getting higher degrees, doing freelance projects), but still I think this train is headed the wrong way.
But what do we really know about where we are? How many times have we started off in one place thinking that we’d end up somewhere that we didn’t? And more importantly, how many times do we think we’re going the wrong way, when really we end up where we wanted? The most important thing that maybe we should remember is not where we’ve been or even how we get to where we’re going, but the destination itself. I must, as we all should, keep in mind our goals and just head towards them. Maybe all we really know is that.