I used to have a saying for the direction my life was heading in, ‘Apparently I’m on a destructive path, so get out of my way.’ I was working as a bicycle messenger and every turn presented some kind of danger, risk of death and worst of all the prospect of being out of work. Every time you embark on a new job, your brain is plotting a path, navigating around known obstacles and preventatively planning around the possibility of new obstacles. Every package is a fresh start, a new dawn, an instant of starting over and improving on your last endeavor.
Starting a new job can be like going to the movies, hearing a live band play, or going to a reading by your favorite author. It’s a new experience, it’s exciting and your time is filled with wonderment. You hang on to every moment not knowing what’s going to happen next, what will be introduced, what will tickle your senses and pave the way for new things and validation. But what if you start an old job, a return to a bygone career you promised yourself you’d never return to, either to prevent ruining prior experiences or because you have been deeply soured by the first go round. Either way, your deepest instincts tell you not to go back. You can’t go home again, so why would you think you’d be able to go to work again. Similar principles apply, the you that was you then, is no more. The life you lived then is not the life you live now. For the mass populous living in the moment, it’s difficult to see yourself tuning into your favorite television show sometime in the future without any reference between what you saw last and what is happening currently. You’re lost, disinterested and worst of all, something that had a memorably lasting impression on you is now completely ineffectual and boring.
I was a bicycle messenger in college, for those of you who don’t know what that is, there are people, like myself, who ride a bicycle through busy, dangerous city streets nine hours a day five days a week carting around everything from rolls of architectural drawings to fully-potted house plants. It’s the science of finding the shortest route around the bumps in the road, the daunting hills of completion and the traffic and congestion of everyday obstacles. Any tangible item of urgency and impression that cannot be faxed, emailed, relayed, phoned or whispered, is generally carried by messengers. Think of UPS drivers who pick things up and deliver them one at a time on a bicycle, that’s what I did, and that’s what I do. I had a wonderful experience in college, splitting my time between scholastic pursuits, extracurricular endeavors and working downtown, dabbling in the corporate infrastructure. I was sure that once I finished college, I would move on to better jobs, more important positions that utilized all of my various talents. What I found instead was a workforce I was in no way prepared for, a string of jobs that possessed redeeming attributes at arm’s length, but without any actual satisfaction or fruition. So I began talking about it, musing, if I couldn’t find anything else, that would be my fallback job.
Many people have fallback jobs, for some it’s waiting tables, tending bar, others work in bookstores and movie theaters, some end up working in offices as secretaries or personal assistants while others start a career at the bottom, never to rise an inch. It is with these fallback careers that many people are fording the flood of unemployment. With a sour economy and rampant joblessness, it is natural that people will come to accept what comes their way, what is available, familiar and open. As we trickle back to our fallback careers, searching for more meaningful ones begins to seem farther and farther away, job security sounds like a distant island where everyone is perpetually on vacation and they can’t spend their money fast enough. Tough economic times call for tightening of belts, reigning in flagrant fiscal flippance and favoring flagrant frugality. Though our future appears bleak, I’m grateful to have a job to come back to, a skill that can carry me through, and a position that though insecure at times, is always in consistent demand.
Can we perform to the degree of what is demanded of us? How much compromise are we as a hollow workforce willing to make? Often it is easy to see oneself walking out the door with famous last words drying at your lips and into a search for a better life. Some say finding a job is a full-time job in itself. My grandfather always said, ‘It’s easier to find a job when you have a job.’ Who’s right? I’ve been looking for work off and on since May of 2007, I worked freelance for a short while, but the open-ended nature of work and payment scared me and I decided to pursue what I could as an employee instead. I worked for artists, making art, building structures, painting, but that too, was open-ended, had no future, and ultimately had no permanence. Should I have left? Probably not, but it was only a month later that they laid off their entire workforce, who weren’t eligible for unemployment anyway. I had an advantage of starting my job search early, before more consequential layoffs. Did that help? Not really, I was out of work for five months before I decided to go to my fall back job. So does having a job help you get a job? It might, the appearance of being in demand, an employee of value who holds the structure of a company together is far more attractive than the last person picked for a sports team. Not working presents you as the slow kid, or the kid without aptitude, or who isn’t physically fit. You become the outcast of the workforce, unwanted by any team regardless of how uncomplete or uneven the teams are, they’d rather play without you. So, does taking a step backward in your career really prepare you to enter where you left? No. It doesn’t do much more than keep you afloat, paying rent, feeding yourself, before someone even takes notice of you.
The economy has got to get better, promises were made, motions are in action, things are happening and will happen. But until then, I feel obligated to fall back on what I can, trip over jobs I said I wouldn’t do again. Make new experiences, new lives with what is available to us. Wishing and hoping and praying and dreaming is great fun and it keeps us going, but we have to mobilize what we have available and complete something, bring something to fruition, or by the time our dream jobs are being offered again, we won’t have the luster left to take it.
Being a bicycle messenger is very satisfying work, you work as hard as you can, you’re paid for the work you put in and you gain a sense of accomplishment every time you deliver a job. Not to mention lots of fresh air and exercise. The problems come from the same places they appear at every job, from the top. Working in hierarchical environments usually produces the trickle effect, the idea that poop rolls downhill and some days you feel less like a person and more like a freight elevator, people riding you up and down all day carrying the weight of the masses from one floor to the other and being cursed when you don’t work exactly how they please. Mostly though, you’re your own boss, you hang out with other coworkers when you’re not working, and the whole world is your office, one big, open maze of buildings, loading docks and offices where you work. But that’s not what I want to do with my life, that’s not how I want to spend my 30s, I don’t want to wake up 40 wondering what I’ll do in my old age with bad knees no retirement, health care or social security (because it’s all gone). So I’ve decided to work nights, not in a liquor store or a restaurant, not mopping floors in a research facility, but from home, writing, researching, applying for jobs that were posted the previous day, keeping my skills sharp and my mind wound, keeping my inner clock from losing it’s numbers and clouding the future I can see. If you already work nights, your days are your nights, and you’ve got the jump on those who work days. But don’t lose sight of the future, don’t lose sight of your hope and your goals.
As long as you can see yourself in motion, as long as you can perceive change in your life, you can hang on to some kind of hope. So long as you still have enough time to live your life, you’ve got time to change your life. We have many careers over our lifetimes, and it’s never to late to start a new one, it’s never too late to learn a new skill, it’s never too late to shift course, to re-route to move away, travel. It’s never so late you can’t decide, don’t wait for the bottom to hit you on the ass. I promised myself I wouldn’t go back, I said it was too late, I was too old. Maybe I am, maybe it is too late and maybe I am too old, maybe these young bucks who’ve shown up in my place are where I was and I’m just reliving a bygone moment in my life. But I’m making a new memory, a new life, as a new me with a different perspective, whether it’s a good thing, a productive thing, I can’t say. But I’m back, I’ve returned, I’ve rejoined the workforce, navigating through the toil and roadblocks, meandering through familiar surroundings that have become new and unfamiliar and I’m finding my way to put a little money in my pocket, some positivity in an uncertain future and another route around the bumps in the road, the hills of completion and the traffic and congestion of everyday life. Apparently I’m on a constructive path, pave the way.
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