Winter is coming. Literally.
I just passed the two hundred post milestone on this writing project, and it has come a long way since I started with a big idea and a handful of introductory posts back in the deeps of last winter. And here we come again.
Summer was a time of rejuvenation and new ideas, and I spent a lot of the time behind the scenes expanding out the scope of what I was trying to do here, adding features to the website, creating offline “book” versions of my content, and injecting a ton of metadata into the posts that interlink, expand, and clarify the things that I am sharing as nuggets of personal insight.
It is my personal search for purpose. It feels that way sometimes.
I came from a realm of professional burnout. I gave the legendary one hundred and ten percent to my various jobs for about twenty-five years, which by my math puts me about two hundred and fifty percent in the black.
But that black isn’t an asset. It was char. And about a month or so after writing this I’ll be turning fifty—five-oh—and while that certainly isn’t my personal winter, it definitely feels a lot like autumn.
I take comfort in knowing that I’ve been a bit of an autumn person my whole life, tho, so perhaps this work, this project, this writing, and whatever clarity has tumbled from the effort to over-philosophize and hyper-analyze my own creative soul has marked a seasonal transition.
I can’t necessarily tell you how to find your own meaning, but wrapping your head around where you’ve been through introspection, writing and refocus has definitely started working some magic on me.
Hunker down, the weather is about to shift.
Terms FROm this POSt
- burnout
- If I occasionally rage against the machine of capitalism it is because it once used me to stoke its own fires and I came out the other side charred and spent. I have given myself too deeply and too freely for the success of others, a noble thing when done for the right reasons, a terrible and painful loss when given for the wrong ones.
- fifty year-old
- I had recently turned forty-nine when I started this writing project and spent the first year of posts staring down the trail of my fifties. I would like to think this brings age and experience to my perspective, and not some out-of-touch failing sensibility. That is yet to be determined.
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write here. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
- professional
- There is a formality to this term, linked to the idea of a captial-P professional like a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. Instead, I often use it simple to refer to the span in my life as a average joe salaryman, sitting at a desk in a neat shirt and tie and replying to emails: I was a business professional, but lacking any real formal certification.
- winter
- Where I come from this season isn’t just a metaphor for something, nor is it an abstraction linked to a romantic holiday snowfall. Rather it is a deep months-long freeze that restricts travel and keeps us hiding in our homes for nearly half the year. Many of us embrace it, but the reality is that cold is cold is cold and it is limiting as much as it inspires.
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