“Free Fallin’” By Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (1989)
So, this is it. My last day earning money since my unbroken stretch started in 2002. There was about a year after my mother’s death when I temped on and off, but I don’t remember what I did during that time otherwise. I can’t tell what is having the bigger impact on my ability to sleep – the last hours of the truly terrible work I had to do to justify my company paying me for the last few weeks or entering (another) huge unknown. Like there aren’t enough of those already in this age of coronavirus.
It feels a little like I’m in that Tom Petty song, Free Fallin’ – a song that started out as a laugh but turned into a top 10 hit. In order to free fall you have to jump off of something. My jump is that I will not be taking a position I don’t want (only partially because it cuts my salary by 25%) just to stay employed. Like the song, my jump does not feel like a frantic plummet, but rather a slow float on wind currents I cannot see. At least, it does so far. I have never been comfortable with risk, but it has occurred to me that this may be the Universe telling me that this is my opportunity to really pursue a career realignment.
That is an optimistic read of the situation, and frankly, I do have doubts that I can swing it. One of my biggest potential obstacles will be myself. I am not the most disciplined person, so I will have to find a balance between productive activity and a tendency toward inertia. I need to be able to accommodate both in order for my free fall to remain a slow float.
As much as I am undisciplined, I am also a planner. And, while it took me forever to learn this, plans are not set in stone. I can change them if they aren’t working. Here’s my first shot:
Priority 1: Condition care -- eating healthy and exercising
Keep cooking healthy meals, limit buying snacks and unhealthy impulse buys
Build exercise plan – cardio and weights 3x/week
Priority 2: Job search -- applying to jobs and networking
Apply to two jobs or reach out to two contacts in a relevant industry 3x/week
Priority 3: Stress reduction -- spending time outside, meditating, reading, etc.
Spend an hour outside every day, either walking or on the balcony reading, working, eating, and/or watching clouds
Use Headspace (my meditation app) to get to sleep on my chosen schedule as often as necessary (no mindless TV watching to delay bedtime)
Priority 4: Taking time to do nothing and not feel guilty about it -- games on my phone, TV binging
Allow daily – but limited – time to veg out and be mindless
You may notice that the schedule is made to be fairly flexible. There’s a lot of stuff on it, but also plenty of room to adjust from one day to the next.* If I made it any more rigid, I would just be setting myself up for immediate failure. I do that a lot, actually: great plan, lasts three days, too hard to maintain, quit. So many start over plans. Since this is an open-ended situation, I can’t afford to set myself up for failure and keep starting over. I need to find a good status quo.
Knowing myself as I do, I suspect that there will be weeks where I leave everything to the last three days. And there will be days I accomplish nothing, resulting in busy, exhausting but productive days. But it should all balance out in the end.
I have set my first “term” for this plan as a month. I will keep notes of what I do every day, and based on whether I am hitting my goals, I will keep what has worked and adjust what hasn’t. I will not add anything to my priorities, just adjust approaches, add breaks, or increase frequency if I think I can take it.
Getting through an unknown situation can be lots of things, but the two most likely paths I see for myself are frantic inertia, where I desperately wait for something to happen while I waste time on my couch, and frenetic productivity, where I burn out applying to every job that seems remotely appropriate while all the rest falls by the wayside. I hope by being deliberate and following my own plans, I will be able to find a middle ground, free fallin’ until I land softly.
*There is also a lot of stuff not on the schedule – cleaning my apartment, catching up on stuff I have been putting off, building up a library of posts so I am not always scrambling at the last minute – but they are not priorities. I can do them if I am inclined, but I don’t want to pressure myself to do them.