I’ve got a lot to think about this Labor Day. In 2019, I started a tradition inspired by Gretchen Rubin to annually craft a word or short phrase to serve as a north star in my work life. Usually I simply microblog it to my Quiche socials, however, this year there’s really a lot going on right now and we all know that I don’t blog all that much. I find myself currently sitting in a relatively calm, quiet space between all the chaotic events that seem to gobble up our days and that we call life. I’ve got some rare spoons, so let’s get into it.

I quit my soul-crushing job, and only because I have a modest amount of privilege to do so. Mostly because I found myself 50 and wanting a house with a yard. I want to grow things. I want to sit outside in a relatively private place to sip a beverage, soak in a little bit of nature, to pause and breathe. My SO and I did some future searching and it just wasn’t going to work in the Bay Area. He was job searching and landed a position near my hometown in Santa Barbara County, so now I find myself doing something I didn’t ever think I’d do, let alone be excited about. I’m going back to my hometown and I honestly haven’t felt this certain about a decision since the night I looked into my SOs eyes and knew I’d get old with him. So we quickly moved him and the cats down the coast into a small apartment while I stayed behind, quit my job, and tended to packing and moving our house and preparing it for sale. Today I sit in a mostly empty townhouse coordinating a few small rennovation projects and getting ready to join my little family. The goal is a forever home and I’ll of course need to find a new job myself to cover mortgage payments on a new home.

There’s no small amount of angst brewing here as a aging woman with a disability looking for work in a field I’m relatively new to. Further complicating things is a volatile and uncertain economy rapidly getting shittier and state vocational rehab services are effectively at a standstill for blind job seekers like me. It’s not clear that I’ll have access to resources that would support my job search, and those supports have been slow as molasses and difficult to access in good times. These are not good times.

While I knew pretty quickly that my last job wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run for so many reasons, it also became clear to me in the months before I left that I was simply outgrowing a job that just wasn’t a good fit, anyway. Like many lessons in life, I had to directly experience what I didn’t want to better understand what I do want. I definitley don’t care for supervising people. I want to focus more on production. I want to work with others who are truly in it for the craft and not just because it’s a fucking job. And while there are probably lots of options that would honor these lessons, I am not entirely clear on what kind of work I want to look for and which of those options is realistically going to work as a blind person. And that will pay a mortgage.

The Grass is Green Where You Water It

Just less than a week ago in the throes of 6 1/2 12-hour days of puttering, packing, cleaning, sorting, organizing, and purging, I caught something in a woman’s career podcast I was listening to, “The grass is green where you water it.” A light bulb flickered, “I like it,” I thought, “for my upcoming Happier Labor Day mantra. Then I promptly forgot it days later when the dust of the movers clearing the house settled and it arose in a conversation with a friend. I reviewed the last several podcasts I’d listened to and finally found it. The more I sat with it, the less excited I was about it, though. I don’t want to grow grass, unless it’s for my kitties, and what about the scarcity of water? Okay, maybe my hamsters were running overtime, though I just wanted something more nuanced, more elegant.I grabbed a cup of tea (I’m out of coffee at the moment) and hit the couch with my keyboard to process and write to work it out. I was delightfully distracted by a notification that usually means my kitties are prowling the living room in the now much smaller space they are still grudgingly adjusting to. I found, instead, my SO carrying the camera around to find it a new home amongst all of our possessions that had been delivered two days prior, so I got to have an IRL convo with him instead of the abundant messaging we usually do. I put my quandry out for his feedback, grasping for the concept I learned two summers agoat the Gill Tract Farm, for which my brain had suddenly deleted the name of. My best description of emergent strategy (the term I had lost in the moment, brought up for him a quote from our recently departed national treasure, Dolly Parton and I knew immediately it was exactly what I was looking for.

I’m no expert on emergent strategies, though it was presented to me in a moment when I was sheepishly apologizing for my discomfort and dislike of SMART goals and objectives, utterly validated with the response that this is not how we intuitively function as humans and that we squash and silence our intuition in deference to artificial social constructs imposed on us from the outside. The Japanese concept of ikigai effectively asks us to answer the same kinds of questions: What are you good at? What do you love? What does the world need? What can you get paid for? Answering these questions and considering all the intricate areas of Ven diagram overlap is a tool for identifying your reason for being. As ever, the wisdom of the Dolly Mama makes it all feel so much simpler and more manageable.

So as I move into another year of balancing a quest for purpose and meaning with not just surviving but thriving in a harsh, uniquely American form of capitalism, I’ll keep chewing on emergent strategies and ikigai, and I’ll hold onto the wisdom of the Dolly Mama to light the way. Life is certainly a delightful journey to find out who you are and do it with purpose. Thanks, Dolly.

I’ll be in the 93436. I recently became certified as a UC Master Food Preserver Volunteer, I have about 18 months of experience working in a commercial kitchen, and I am ServSafe Manager certified through May 2028. I love playing with food, I have a broad base of knowledge and experience to draw from, and I want to learn new stuff that I don’t know yet. I’m a novice farmer and gardener and I love tastings and new food experiences. Anyone looking for another set of hands in their operation?