Over dinner recently Alex mentioned for the first time that he missed home. More specifically, when we nervously dug for detail, he said that he missed the cottage and Collingwood. Grandparents take note! We had talked in bits and pieces in the past about missing family, special friends, the odd food group, or a specific toy, but this was the first time that one of the kids had volunteered this information unprompted. There were even a few tears! We both winced. Would this be the beginning of a long and protracted 'missfest" that would need hours of counselling and the consoling that only ice cream could bring? We weren't sure. But despite our immediate misgivings, we were suddenly throwing caution to the wind and opening up the conversation to list all of the things about Canada we all missed. I believe drive thrus, Tim Hortons, girls nights, and hockey night in Canada were all part of the discussion.
On another level, Linton was recently reading a book about an Australian woman's experiences after having quit work to travel Europe for six months with her husband. In a conversation with a friend she talks about the fact that as a professional, she was having trouble with the concept of not producing something on a daily basis. Her life had been defined so much by what she created at work and the responsibilities that came with a successful career that a life without those types of realities seemed hollow and vague - despite the travel, food, and chance to enjoy a bottle of wine every night! She was missing the personal validation that work gave her.
In my organizational learning class today, (my final class of the semester) we were talking about how one measures whether or not people have learned things in an organization. The conversation went around things like key performance indicators and performance reviews as the obvious ways that employees are motivated to learn and grow in ways that are beneficial to the company. Personally, they seem more like whips and carrots rather than anything that is linked to real learning or real personal growth. Very few organizations it seems, due to time constraints, competition, money, or a lack of resources can ever afford to let people grow at their own pace in their own direction. That is of course very logical but also a bit...sad. Our professional growth never really allows us to fully grow as a person or one often comes at the cost of the other.
And so we get to a point with our work life where we feel unfulfilled. If we can, we jetison ourselves away from work into adventures and experiences that will hopefully allow us to expand our lives in a way that work could not or would not. We travel, we change our look, we take a masters, we raise our kids, we have more kids, we reno our house, we take up a new hobby, we get a dog, we do something to add to our life in a way that hopefully teaches us something about the world that work could not (but might still be valuable to someone and look good on a resume when we finally come running back to the office in a year's time). And yet, like the woman in Linton's book, just when we get far enough away from work, in both time and space, a tiny little voice in the back of our head says - 'I miss working". And so in some sort of mad moment of pure self-important delirium we imagine what all of our colleagues are doing through every moment of the day and the chaos that must be ensuing because we are not there, we check our emails, we talk to colleagues, we read old files and write new ones in our heads, we do a million things like that just for the sheer need to know that we are still connected and that we still matter. And yet...when one of our trusty old colleagues finally does have enough time to get their head up from the grind to fire us off a three line answer to our "How's it going?" subject line from three weeks ago - we suddenly realize that the place hasn't changed, it's all still there, you're not really missed, and all of the reasons that you left in the first place are just under the surface if you care to scratch it.
And so while, like Alex, we will continue to miss our family, our friends, the cottage and Collingwood and maybe even a little Timmy Hos, we are fairly certain that we can avoid missing work - at least for a few more months. We know it' still there, somewhere, and when we return to it, it will be very much like the work we left just a few short months ago. Indeed, what we are slowly beginning to learn in our little organization called a family is that this is a year where we are defined, not by work, but by who we are as people, as parents, as a husband and a wife. Roles that we may never have more time to learn about, than we do this year.
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