Decidedly Not an Identity Crisis

I never identified with my career. I wasn’t tied to being an engineer, or a leader, inventor, mentor, or manager. Since I graduated from college some years ago now, I’ve been fortunate to have had just two “real” jobs. I often loved them, sometimes hated them, and most days just showed up and gave my best effort—but the job wasn’t me. It never was.

I raced bikes. I traveled. I wrote poetry. I took thousands of photos that largely nobody has seen. I’ve had dogs pass through my life and have been fortunate to have a good wife who tolerated all of it.

If we remove “work” from the last twenty-plus years, we’re left with those things. We have scribbled notebooks, hundreds upon hundreds of trip itineraries, and mountains of unprocessed photos capturing it all.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that, at the core of it, I’m simply a traveler, a writer, and a photographer—but I’ve largely kept it under cover, with work providing the way to get paid for what I enjoyed doing.

When circumstances changed in the job, the travel dried up, and I was left writing regulatory documents, it was time to step off the merry-go-round. I was left with a year of pondering: with work gone, who was I really? And it was clear.

Sitting here at SNA, waiting for a flight to ORD followed by a drive home in the morning, it’s time to get this started—to share the things I love, and probably more importantly, the reasons why.

Some things in our lives have been there so long that we never question why we love them, and we have a hard time explaining to a friend at the bar the reasons behind our passions. I’m not saying there needs to be a reason. Phones are everywhere, watches should be obsolete, and the car should have finished off the bicycle like it did the horse—but still, the heart loves what it loves.

I can’t guarantee that it will all make sense. I’m not sure my thoughts will move in a straight line. But if I write it, and you read it, then at the end of the day I can call myself a writer. I suppose I already can, based on the dozens of user manuals I’ve written over the years—but other than to technical writers, would anyone really count that? Come on. Nobody reads the instructions!

And so, next time, we’ll explore a passion—and I’ll try to explain why.