8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [07] Poise & Purpose

Burnout, boredom, and the hunger for meaning in the work you do.

Chapter List

  • Hard Change, two

    (Continued from Hard Change)

    Change is hard.

    The one thing you never really understand the gravitas of until it body slams you down to the ground of your own ambitions is that there is struggle at every level and with every step.

    I have been crossing the bridge of change for over two years as I write this having left what many would consider a cushy government job in search of something with far less bureaucracy and far more agency to do work that was (for lack of a better way to put it) morally and creatively positive. There are a thousand and one nuances to that statement and a career spanning twenty-five years stacked with as many successes as struggles, but in the end the yearning for something greater than being a cog in a machine won out.

    And what I have I learned is that so few respect that struggle. Those still on solid ground almost unanimously reject the very idea of crossing a bridge to something new.

    The other cogs in the machine often seem resentful.

    Those yearning to have their turn in the machine are often scornful.

    And the many who reject the machine itself are distrustful of anyone who ever participated in the machine at all.

    I stepped out of the machine to find a purpose for the second half of my life that was far across that bridge of change, invisible on the other side, though something of which I had heard through rumours might exist. What I suspect is that the bridge itself might be so long that the crossing of it is the destination itself.

  • Hard Change

    Change is hard.

    Until I went through the work of trying to rebuild my career from scratch I spent a tremendous amount of time looking across the bridge of that change and imagining what was on the other side. 

    Before I spin this little essay into a retelling of a whole “grass is greener on the other side” idiomatic fallacy of yearning, I will clarify: I think that yearning for change can be motivated by all sorts of things, and yes, visualizing the future state of your life in a positive way is one of those things. I also think there are a lot of reasons that people seek change in their lives and none of them are entirely right-thinking nor entirely wrongheaded, either. 

    Change is motivated by many things and each of those things is shaped by personal circumstance, individual and unique as fingerprints, combining the notions of our histories, our dreams, our hopes and our fears. And more so, I think that if you were to ask anyone to fully explain their motivation for change they might look at you with a distant stare and struggle to fully explain the deepest of those impulses to cross the bridge into something new.

    I have been walking across my own bridge for over two years now and I still cannot quite see the other side except in whispered rumours and hints of something interesting when the fog occasionally shifts and my vision clears long enough to look. It’s a hard walk. And an even harder one to justify to those still standing on solid ground.