Spiritual Awakening at an Economic Crossroads

The day before Thanksgiving I ran into a former colleague in the lobby of our local movie theater.  My mother and I were coming out of a matinee and he and his son were going into the latest Harry Potter film.  Not known for our congeniality when we worked together, our unexpected encounter was friendly and in an odd way comforting.  He asked me what I was doing now and after saying “nothing,” I quickly added, “Well, that’s not true. I’m writing for a local magazine, blogging, doing freelance stuff.”  He looked impressed, but more likely was being polite.  I hoped my cheery offering that I was publishing would banish the self-consciousness I felt for being without a job after more than a year.

A late bloomer when I entered the corporate world at 40, some part of me had felt that I’d at last arrived at the place of long sought-after security and stability.  Overnight, I’d gone from a college adjunct living one paycheck to the next to Consultant, then Regional Account Manager, and finally Client Service Manager.  I had my own laptop, expense account and corporate credit card.  Employer-paid medical and a 401K (which I’d never had to that point) were the icing on the cake.  It was a huge move professionally and financially from where I had been the previous ten years.  With this increase in income I had bought my first new car, was able to take real vacations and when my husband and I married, to move into an ‘upscale’ neighborhood surrounded by a golf course.  On the surface, everything looked right.

For the first several years the work was exciting and I enjoyed the travel, compensation and perks that came with a corporate career.  But when I married for the first time at 43 and two of my husband’s three teenagers came to live with us, I found the once stimulating work and the non-stop travel exhausting when combined with my new family responsibilities.  I had soldiered on for another two years, subsequently receiving a promotion to management that put me back in the office full time, but something important was missing and I knew it.  When layoffs hit the office where I worked and I was demoted back to traveling Consultant, the writing was on the wall.  In September 2009 a work day seemingly like any other turned out to be my last.

There’s something about long-term unemployment at midlife that makes you question your values.  Not just the material ones, but the spiritual ones too. However, since they were closer to consciousness I started with the material ones.  Newly unemployed and concerned about our sudden financial decline, I called every creditor that offered programs for ‘low income’ customers.  My husband and I weather-stripped doors and curtained previously uncovered windows.  We received a supply of wood from a family member that took us through the cold winter months.  We re-calculated our food budget and bought a seal-o-meal so we could stretch each meal as far as it would go.  We juggled bills and combined trips to town to save gas.  In short, we responded creatively to unexpected and challenging circumstances and I wondered why we hadn’t employed some of these methods even when times weren’t so lean.

Although our resources were fewer, they weren’t altogether absent and I saw, perhaps for the first time, that my ability to live should not—must not—be dependent upon my employment status.  This came to me most powerfully one day when I was standing in the backyard, hanging clothes on the line and my husband said that we needed to buy “such and such.”  In that moment I realized that consumption, like life itself, would continue with or without that job.  It was a profound insight and the beginning of a spiritual awakening.

Looking back I saw how subtly and powerfully my career had come to define me.  When it was suddenly gone, I had the painstaking work of rediscovering who I was apart from it. I’d grown accustomed to being in the driver’s seat, navigating my life mostly by wit and will and believing I had more control than I did. Being bumped to passenger was humbling and I started writing again to gain some perspective on my circumstances.

As I wrote, I discovered that my pursuit of what I thought was a “successful life” had left me depleted and depressed.  Certainly not in the beginning, but definitely as time wore on. All my achievement, my contributions were outside myself.  Until I stopped working, I hadn’t seen this nor had I known how much I’d needed some down time to rest, read, or knit; to go to a movie, walk or bike; to sleep in, meet a friend for lunch, or simply do nothing for a few hours.  It was in these quieter moments that I began to nurture my creative self, at the heart of which was a blocked writer.

I’d written since I could hold a pencil.  For me writing had always been my way of making sense of the world but in the past few years my journal entries had stopped. I was too busy and felt ‘dry’ creatively.  The funny thing was that as soon as I ceased my frenetic work pace and started writing again, my creativity flowed forth.  With nothing to lose, I started the blog in March.  I wrote about my regret for having turned away from the writing life in Six Degrees of Separation, figuring that many people could relate to their own road not taken; about my dying friend George in Passages, knowing that loss and grief come to all of us sooner or later; about my quest for a healthy body in Midlife Midriff and a healthy diet in What’s Really For Dinner?, believing that men as well as women might laugh as they identified with my predicaments.

Having aspired to be a writer since I was a young girl, and now feeling emboldened, I queried a regional magazine about freelance opportunities.  It had been years since I’d written anything of publishable quality and although I knew I had it in me, my confidence hadn’t yet been fully restored.  (Anyone who has lost a job will know the feeling.)  Nonetheless, I took a deep breath and followed the inner edict to ‘just do it anyway’ and that leap of faith led to becoming a contributing writer for enjoy magazine, a Northern California lifestyle monthly.

Around the same time, I joined a local writer’s forum and started a critique group with another writer I met at the Member’s Read event.  As our bi-monthly meetings progressed, the discipline to write deepened; I had someone waiting to read what I was producing.  I started sending my poetry to literary magazines and began a second blog for the women’s site, skirt.com.  More recently, I’ve been in negotiations to write a column for the local newspaper which I hope to syndicate to other dailies in the newspaper chain. The college where I taught before I entered the corporate world?  They called last week offering me three sections for Spring semester.  Officially, I’m not “unemployed” anymore.

This journey to a new livelihood has brought many insights. First and foremost, that although I was living a materially successful life, I was not living a spiritually meaningful one.  I don’t know that the two are mutually exclusive—who’s to say that one can’t have both? But for me it took a significant reorganization of my finances to prompt a reorganization of my values. The spiritual awakening that followed was the necessary ingredient for my creative life to take form and set me upon my current path.

The ability to translate the raw material for every article, for every blog, for anything that I write into inspiration, comes from within.  It's nurtured by a connection with Spirit, which points up the most important lesson of the past 15 months: I can make do with less materially but I cannot make do without creative purpose in my life.