Fiftieth College Reunion Assignment - What have you been doing since graduation - in 400 words or less?

 

Myself Surprised – I sometimes joke that should be my epitaph.

After graduation, I pretended I would go to law school, but I didn’t. Instead, I drove West, landing in San Francisco with dreams of becoming the next great American writer. Instead, I dabbled in feminist, political, and union movements, drifting from one form of temporary employment to another. Instead, I embarked on a thirteen-year on again/off again affair with the man I married in 1993. Such exciting times. Work was the last thing on my mind.

Accidentally, I developed a career in accounting and administration – first in law firms, then as a sole proprietor, then in non-profits. Such an unlikely path for an English and East Asian History major! 2024 will close that chapter and although I have had a rewarding career, I will not miss it.

The highlights of these last fifty years have little to do with my profession. Advancement has been more something that happened, rather than something I pursued. Whatever my title – Chief Financial Officer, Vice- President, Chief Operating Officer – the thing that mattered most was mission. For that reason, Mother Jones Magazine, FairTrade USA, and PolicyLink  were the high points.

What mattered more than work? Serving on the negotiating committee of a failed attempt to unionize the Bay  Guardian newspaper, mounting a successful one-woman crusade to get the medical help an injured colleague needed in order to walk again, being a founding member of the first urban Cohousing community in the United States, running for Emeryville City Council, building a rich and happy life.

Failure or success? I ask myself that question often.

Last year, I got a note from Laura, a long-ago colleague. It came out of the blue and warmed my heart as few things have. It said, “Both you and Lynn gave me a model of what female leadership could look like and it has informed my own leadership practices. Strength and empathy, combined with a healthy sense of humor – those are a few things I learned from you.“

Last week, I got a note from Carroll, an even longer-ago colleague. It said, “You were such an amazing, supportive mentor to a very young woman…now that I have 2 daughters of my own – just embarking on their lives – I pray that they too will meet amazing supportive mentors.”

I am coming to believe the needle is tilted towards success.

She Works Hard For A Living

It's  not easy to come down from a sixty hour work week. The deadline is past--things went either well or poorly. Most likely, they fell somewhere in between. The work piled up for next week isn't at such a boil--yet--that you can't have a little bit of a weekend. For the moment, life should be good.

But there you are, vibrating like a plucked harp string, your mind whirring, your inner eye ceaselessly scanning, trying to locate the thing you forgot, replaying the trajectory of the just-finished project, following an endless loop of couldda/wouldda/shouldda. The maze of next steps fans out in all directions. Metaphorically, you've run as far and as fast as you are able, but--damn--that horizon isn't even close.

"Relax," everyone says. "Enjoy the weather, take time to stop and smell the roses." You would if you could. But just like in the aftermath of those ancient acid trips, you're not quite returned to what we are pleased to call reality. You can't quite focus, but you're not quite unfocused either.

It's not an entirely terrible situation. There is a slightly bizarre sense of pride--in your stamina, your ability to deliver, maybe even in the results themselves. "I've still got it," you think, even as you lie awake staring at the ceiling, too tired, too revved up to sleep.

Others may or may not appreciate what you just pulled off. Really, it makes only a passing difference whether they do or not, because you do. Making a way out of no way--that's what you'd put on your coat of arms, if you had one. I think of this phase of decompression as the adrenaline after-glow.

What makes this particular ending different from the many that have gone before? Two things, really.

The first is that my organization has a pretty good and pretty well-deserved reputation for honoring work/life balance. We work hard and there's always way, way too much to do. But we also acknowledge that our staff have lives outside of the office. Even though I've got two other projects ready to pop and a mountain of day-to-day work screaming for attention, I can count on getting the response I got when I declined a meeting set for late next week. "Of course you should take time off!"

The second is more subtle, more personal. It's where I am in my career curve.

I've been in this fugue state before, but when I was marooned here in the past, I always knew the road ahead was endless. This just completed project would be followed by another and another and another. Rinse and repeat...for decades. There were undertones of Sartre's No Exit to the space between.

That's not the case any more. There are still years stretching out before me, yes, but no longer decades. Retirement--the thing older workers are never supposed to admit they think about for fear of being labelled tired and spent--is out there. Being able to see it is adding a kind of exhilaration to moving from the altered reality of the deadline to the more rational reality of the interlude between this one and the next.

There's nothing golden about retirement, not in twenty-first century America. But the fact of it, it's new reality, it's unexpected tangibility--I find those things change the horizon in surprising ways.

Instead of feeling myself to be on a forced march from one mountain top to the next, I'm beginning to be able to imagine there is a wide, broad valley beyond these jagged peaks. I'm beginning to be able to imagine rolling hills. What will that be like, I wonder.