On Getting Laid Off

When I was a kid, my mom would go on nightly walks around our neighborhood. Sometimes I’d go with her. We would talk, and I remember saying to her something like this:

I think I’ll do some good stuff in this life if I live long enough.

I was maybe 13 at the time, so this triggered a puzzled (and no doubt somewhat disturbed) reaction from my mom. 

But here’s what I meant, and I still mean it: almost everything that matters to me is a craft, and craft takes lifetimes to learn.  

So it is with a sense of peace and gratitude that I report my role at Starbucks was eliminated. (Or “impacted” to use the preferred nomenclature.) I was with Starbucks for 13 years. I could say that those years went by in a flash, and I could say that I lived multiple lifetimes during those 13 years, and both statements would be true.  

I haven’t explained why my story involves peace and gratitude, so let me tangle the metaphorical web a little further. I was paging through one of my many notebooks the other night and came across the following, written large enough to fill an entire spread in a Field Notes journal: 

Don’t fish the same hole for too long.

Fishing is one of those crafts that requires lifetimes to develop. And I sometimes have a tendency to stall my own development by relentlessly flailing away at the same spot on the river where I saw a trout rise in 1998 (for instance). 

Put more simply: you catch more fish if you know when to move on to the next hole. 

I like to learn the depth of a thing. I like the idea of apprentice as a verb. When a thing starts to dart around like a mosquito on amphetamines, I have trouble keeping up; I’m the first to admit it (and quick to add that in 99 cases out of 100, I find it to be a strength).

I get that this is a little all over the place, but this is what my mind looks like after a shock to the system. And losing my job was most certainly that. 

Chaucer wrote: “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” A few hundred years later, Phil Lesh sang: “Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.”

These are words about love and loss and learning. 

I’ve suffered a great loss, but my love and my learning are intact. 

Just as they have been since I was 13.