For the next two weeks, the Cingolanis drove from one WorldMark resort to the next, making our way through Utah’s southern deserts, then up into Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. From there, we visited the southern Rocky Mountains in New Mexico and the deserts of Arizona. After spending a half-day in Sedona, we all started the drive home. Three weeks plus a day on the road. I still miss it a month later.

(Check out my posts at www.WordsOfWyndham.com for more details about our adventures. Bookmark it if you like, because posts about this trip will be added continually over the next few months.)

Okay, so you’ll recall I got laid off from my job back in December, and while I’ve been doing okay freelancing, I still don’t have a steady gig yet. What the hell are we thinking taking a three-week vacation when we have what many would describe as a pretty unstable financial situation? This thought crossed our minds a lot. It seemed so irresponsible! It’s like we’re constantly receiving messages from the media telling us that we’re supposed to be miserable. That we’re victims of a failing economy. We’re supposed to be stressed out, seething with anxiety!!

I’m sure you can see the dilemma, though. If I had a full-time job, I can’t think of an employer who would give me three weeks off, even if I had the vacation time. So instead of my layoff being a detriment to taking this amazing trip (which has been a dream of mine for years!), it turns out to have been the event that liberated me to take this amazing trip! Plus, I’m too busy and too happy to seethe with anxiety anyway.

So Julie and I decided before the trip that, with our laptop, we’d get some work done here and there while we were on the road, and monitor our emails and phone messages. And since we were staying in timeshare resorts, we’d always have a kitchen, so we avoided pricey restaurant meals as much as possible, and away we went! So in about three weeks’ time, we experienced: Zion National Park, the Las Vegas Strip, Arches National Park, the Rocky Mountains, Red River NM, Petrified Forest National Park, the Grand Canyon, Sedona AZ, the windmill farms of West Texas, and the French Quarter of New Orleans (twice!).

I am still riding an emotional high that may take years to level off!

It’s funny. For more than a decade, I’ve been in the timeshare advertising business and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written and read the phrase “Vacation of a Lifetime!” followed by something like “4 days and 3 nights in Branson, the live entertainment capital of the world!” No offense to Branson — I’ve been there, and had a good time — but what my family and I experienced together truly was a vacation that we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Okay, so because I worked a lot over the weekend, I basically blew off the day. It’s raining. I ran out and got groceries. Mostly I spent the day taking personal inventory on how I felt about everything. Having gone from very busy at a job, to wondering what the hell to do next, to very busy with contract work, I’ve seen this topic from quite a few angles in a short period of time. I’ve come to realize that, when you have a salaried job, in addition to a reliable salary, a predictable routine, and health insurance, it carries another great benefit that you don’t see until you don’t have it any more. A full-time salaried position relieves you of one of man’s greatest fears: the unknown. Particularly, the unknown future.

So here I am, having finished up a project with a tight deadline, and already feeling a little less stressed about deadlines. Then, today, a client emailed me and told me to suspend any work I was doing for them until further notice. And as a result, I’ve gone from insanely busy to just kind of busy.  The reasons for stopping the work make sense to me and I have every reason to believe this is a temporary halt. And there is no part of this that is a reflection of my work. But I don’t “know” if the work will resume. It’s part of that unknown future that, if I were still a full-time employee, I just move on to a different project and I “know” that my check will still clear every other Friday.

Hmm, how to reconcile all this? Having had a taste of being an independent contractor, I love the freedom that comes with it. And while I am personally not there yet, I can see how it can be very lucrative. But I also know that there are feasts and there are famines, and there is an enormous, looming unknown and unknowable future, ALWAYS. This has been the theme of the day.

Here’s the direction I’m leaning: It seems some of the happiest, most fulfilled and professionally successful people in the world are people who have the freedom that I now have (that was actually thrust upon me!) These people must be completely at peace with the unknowable future. They have to be. Otherwise, why would they tolerate the constant fear? Why wouldn’t they just opt out for the security of a full-time job? Or, could it be that, in their minds, they DO know the future in the sense that their self-confidence predicts that they will continue to be happy, fulfilled, successful.

After 20 years in the professional work force, this is a new skill I’m trying to develop — the ability to be at peace with knowing absolutely nothing about the future. But knowing always that I will be engaged, alive and happy in each present moment.

In today’s world, it seems that being at peace with an unknown future is a more and more important skill to have. So if you’re reading this, and you’re one of these people who are completely comfortable with the unknown future, PLEASE share your thoughts. Feel free to lead the way if you are so inclined.

In the back yard of her house in Decatur, Illinois, Oma had an enormous cherry tree. So, as you might guess, cherries made their way into many recipes, and not just pies and cobblers. Cherry raisins (which she dried in the oven), cherry preserves, cherry cookies. I still love cherries to this day.

Lately, we’ve all been getting a refresher course on the history of the Great Depression. We watch documentaries about the stock market crash of 1929, always framed in comparison to the “economic crisis” of 2008-2009. We absorb grainy black-and-white film of people standing in bread lines, or sitting on the front porches of clapboard dust bowl shacks in tattered clothes, looks of hunger on their faces. And we’ve all heard about the 25% unemployment rate during this Great Depression.

(Before I go any further, I want to assure you that this is not leading into an empty discussion about how today’s economic problems are no where near as bad as what my Oma experienced in the twenties and thirties. We’ve all heard that, and we all get it, right? In short, it stinks now, it stunk worse then, but it still stinks now.)

So moving on, one morning about a week or so before my son was born, Oma fell down in her assisted living apartment in Deland, Florida. Every morning, the staff would call each resident and they had to answer the intercom to make sure they were okay. If they didn’t answer, someone would come check on them. Oma fell only a short time after this call, and she wasn’t able to get up. She became dehydrated and weak, and by the time they placed their call the next morning, which she didn’t answer, her condition had worsened beyond the point where she could recover.

I went to visit her a few days before she died. And she told me that, as she looked back on her time on earth, she had had a happy life. She talked about how happy her children and grandchildren were. “Sometimes it wasn’t easy,” she said. “But when I look at my grandchildren, and everybody’s doing so well and you all have wonderful families, I think to myself, I did pretty good.” And then she dozed off. I said goodbye and left, and that was the last time I saw her.

In her life, my grandmother, Oma, was many things. She was a history buff who knew several foreign languages and was fascinated with the genealogy of our family. She taught high school German for years in Decatur. (In fact, “Oma” is German for “grandmother”.) And while I’m sure living through the Great Depression must have been painful for her at the time, she grew to develop a fascination with it as a part of history. I sometimes wonder if she collected all those napkins and sugar packets and jellies to maintain a connection to her experience during this fascinating time. She was proud of having been part of the generation that outlasted the Great Depression and won WWII.

I think that if Oma were still alive today, she would recognize this time as another turning point in the arc of history. Things are happening today that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Everywhere you direct your focus, you can see it. Everywhere, that is, except inward. I hope to view the world today as Oma might have: with my eyes wide open, focused on the tectonic plate shifting of history that’s all around us and the new mountain ranges that I expect to emerge.

This is an amazing time to be alive and on this planet, regardless of my individual circumstances and I don’t want to look back on this time with regret. I don’t want to wish that I had lived more in the moment. I don’t want to regret that I shielded my eyes from it.

And when I’m the old guy at the Dairy Queen taking my grandkids out for ice cream, I’ll shove a few napkins and red plastic spoons in my pocket when we leave, but only after I’ve told them the stories about how we got through this tough time. Because I will have paid close attention while it was happening.

I can’t help to wonder… maybe when you work smart, but not hard, what you’re doing is making money at someone else’s expense, someone who wasn’t able to work as smart as you were. And because that person is also part of our larger economy, the net gain is zero. Whereas, working hard is a way to make money by producing something… anything. As opposed to making money by shifting it around to your advantage.

Anyway, as my thoughts expanded, I found myself searching for actual meaning in all this. For me, this is somewhat of a coping strategy; it diverts my focus away from the “my life sucks” aspect of being a victim of the economy. That component is ever-present thanks to the media coverage anyway, so I feel if I don’t take steps to look away, it can become debilitating. (Sort of like Perseus looking at Medusa only through the mirrored surface of his shield in order to slay her, only the real Perseus of Greek Mythology, not Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans.)

Clearly, the best-chronicled meaning is the one described above: that as a society, we got greedy. The world got greedy for high-interest yields on their investments. The banks got greedy with their sub-prime mortgages. Companies got greedy chasing higher and higher stock values. Even people like you and me started feeling entitled to big-screen TVs, luxury vacations, swimming pools in our backyards, SUVs, and so on. And there seemed to be no limit to how far people would indebt themselves to possess these things.

But there must be more meaning out there, especially for me personally, and one of the biggest questions that keeps coming to my mind is, “What am I made of?” We’re all in the same boat. It’s easy to look around at the World and come to the conclusion that the World stinks. But does it, really? Next time you’re driving along a road in the country, try this: imagine an animal, a squirrel perhaps, standing in those woods, far enough from the road that you can’t see it. And try to imagine what that squirrel is thinking about. Probably looking for a shady place to rest, something to eat, maybe a mate.

Do you imagine that squirrel is angry or sad or overwhelmed, thinking the World stinks?

The World doesn’t stink. The temporary circumstances of a lot of people stink, but the World is doing just fine even if we haven’t got our acts together.

So here I am again, wondering what I’m made of. What kind of person do I want  to be when temporary circumstances stink? Who do I look up to and admire and how would they respond to my circumstances?

My answers to these questions are still in development, but I feel like I’m off to a good start. However, my answers aren’t really important to anyone other than me. What is important is that, by asking and answering these questions, I have some hope that I’ll eventually arrive at some Meaning about the world. About me and who I am. What kind of person I am. And if I can achieve this, when the temporary circumstances of people improve, I’ll feel that I’m a better person for having gone through this experience. I hope.

This was a day after I had spent nearly three hours walking from business to business in the little town center near my house, introducing myself, talking about marketing and handing out business cards. My first tangible step in trying to drum up new business as a marketing consultant.

Sixteen years ago, I spent a year and a half selling life insurance. I was awful at it. And working out of an office filled with successful agents, I was reminded daily exactly how inept I was at selling life insurance. I was the Citigroup, AIG and General Motors of life insurance agents all rolled into one!

And there I went last Thursday, sixteen years older and wiser, more confident, less self-conscious, throwing myself right back into the arena of my most humbling defeat: selling. And, man, it was a blast! Sure, there were a few people who were irritated and standoffish, but I met some really interesting, friendly business owners over those three hours and handed out a lot of business cards. Collected quite a few, too.

Then, Friday morning, I dutifully sent follow-up emails to everyone I had met, thanking those I had spoken to for their time. Letting others know I had dropped by and to contact me if they needed anything. I went into this exercise wanting to be totally in the moment while I was making my rounds, and not judging the experience as good or bad based on the responses I got. I wanted to step outside myself and observe “me” to see how “I” would respond. I was fascinated by it. And with that fascination and what I learned about myself, I had fulfilled my expectations.

So now that my cartoon cell phone moment was over, I checked the voice mail. It was a real estate agent who was out when I dropped by, asking me to come back to his office to discuss some projects he wanted me to bid on. This is something I’ve thought about doing for quite a while, and I’m glad to now have the time to do it!

Let me back up a little. I am a writer. Even though my career took me in a different direction, the writer emerged from time to time with ideas and ambitions. In younger days, I had started a half dozen or so novels or screenplays. Wrote short stories (for free) for a freebie tabloid. However, I tended to get into projects and lack whatever it took to finish. Once the project started to transition from cool idea with potential into the area of hard work, my will to stick with it always seemed to fade.

About four years ago, I had an epiphany that, when I had started these other never-to-be-completed projects, it was the potential that I was enamored with, not the process, not the work. I would talk to my friends about how I was writing a novel or screenplay, and would describe the story idea. It was all about the “dig me” of it. I’m working on a screenplay… I’m cool! But when I would sit down to work on it, I was easily distracted by how great my life was going to be when I published it or sold it to Hollywood.

So I wrote the line about the dead animal system, committed to being in the moment and deriving as much joy as possible from the work, the writing.

And for four years, I wrote when I felt like it. When work situations were bad, the novel was a buddy I could hang out with. When work was good, I might go a couple months without touching it. On nights I had trouble falling asleep, I could think about the next part of the story, instead of what was actually stressing me out. And I never really talked about it, and especially told no one what it was about.

When I was laid off in December, I had just finished the first draft and knew I had a long road of revising and rewriting ahead of me. Then along came this enormous chunk of time. I no longer had to be at my cubicle at 8:30 a.m. I no longer found myself exhausted, just arriving home at 6:30. I decided that if I found a job in a couple of months and had not finished this novel, I would regret it.

So a couple of weeks ago, during my revisions, I wrote the last line: “It then continued circling slowly upward, and I watched it through the viewer, bringing the camera closer to my eyes, trying to maintain the visual image, until the insect’s size in my viewer shrunk to less than a single pixel and it disappeared from my sight.” Followed by “THE END.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, his voice trailing off. “You don’t have a job.” So I tickled him and he screamed a high-pitched squeal that might have shattered a lesser windshield.

Since the layoff about two months ago, I have also been taking Nicky to his twice-weekly karate classes. Watching five and six year olds learn karate is hilarious. They’re simply not coordinated and don’t have the focus to excel in it. (Which is why we take them to karate.) Probably even more hilarious, though, is me trying to help him practice moves with names like “snap kick” and “switch kick.” Karate fits me like an undersized blazer, so it’s a case of the dorky leading the clumsy, but it’s a lot of fun for both of us.

And last night, I was questioning my wife about my daughter’s various responsibilities. At the time, Tessa, who is 12, was upstairs sorting her laundry and cleaning up her room, as I had instructed her to do. “I asked her about homework and she said she didn’t have any,” I said. “What about practicing her flute? Has she practiced this weekend?”

My wife, Julie, just looked at me and said, “What are you, the Mom now?” We realized that, since I was home more often, I was simply more aware of the details about what my kids were doing, their studies, their friends, everything. When I was working, my awareness resulted from a nightly response to the question, “How was your day?” over dinner. Now, I am living within my children’s lives. And while I will tell you I’ve always been close with my kids, we are even closer now.

Eventually, I’ll find a job and start working again. However, because of this time I’ve had with my family, I have a better understanding of the standard I want to live up to as a parent once I’m working again.

It occurs to me that I have a choice to make about how I will remember this time a year from now, ten years from now, on my deathbed. I don’t want to look back on this and think of it as a time when money was tight, or the job market was frustrating, even though those things are all true.  Instead, I am choosing to create memories that I will value forever, and that my kids will, too.

Now if you’ll excuse me, they’re home from school now, so I’m going out in the back yard to play for a while!

[This is my interpretation; to read the entire speech, go to: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html]

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately. Just before Christmas, I was caught up in a huge layoff involving thousands of employees. And even though it was the second layoff in two months, and we all saw another one coming, the experience was jarring. Friends and colleagues I had been seeing daily became email buddies. Practiced routines were irrelevant. The future went from largely unknown to completely unknown. And, this was a job that I loved doing every day. My work was important to me and important to the company’s business.

Normally an upbeat person, I could see clearly how anyone could become engrossed by the thoughts of their own misfortune. And I want to reiterate, I’m talking only about the thoughts  your mind starts spewing out under these circumstances. The job market’s terrible out there. How did this happen to me? I can’t believe no one’s calling me back. What are we going to do when the money runs out. Good God, we’ll lose the house and have to go live with my parents!

Sound familiar?

Yes, losing your job, even when it’s not a reflection of your work or what people think about your work, is an awful experience. But eventually I realized that, when you lose your job, in exchange, you get two amazing gifts: Time and Freedom. And at that point, I resolved that, if I am going to be forced to endure losing a well-paying job that I loved, I am damn well going to derive some joy from these two fantastic gifts!

I’ll elaborate in future posts. For now, remember that the water around you can be refreshing and exhilarating if you only splash around in it!