When I first quit my job, every day was a comparison from then to now. The difference was so startling to me. It was winter so I was splitting my time between my office on the second floor of our home and the fireplace room where, invariably, there is a fire going during the winter. Laptop in hand, I’d spread out on the sofa with papers scattered on both the floor and the coffee table in front of me. If I was in my office, I’d work for a little while at my desk but almost always wind up on either the couch in that room or on the floor, again with papers spread around me. I was still working and sometimes even harder than I had before, but I was in jeans and a sweater, it was calm and quiet and if I wanted a snack, the refrigerator was a mere few steps away.
At that point, my perceptions of the differences were – as you can see – largely physical. It wasn’t that I didn’t get the emotional or systemic change, candidly. It was that I didn’t know how to express it, even to myself.
Today, the differences lie more in the emotional or systemic realms. Life has blended in a way that I am still not sure I can truly describe. But rather than work being something I carved out those hours between 7:15 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. to do, it’s just a part of my everyday. I work, I take a break, I work again. I answer emails and phone calls at night but I run out to the grocery during the day for an item I need for dinner. It’s now, in a sense, seamless. In doing so, it doesn’t feel like work takes up all of my time anymore. Instead, I work and I have the privilege of working on complex and interesting problems, but I do it as part of my integrated life, not as part of a separate “me” that has to shut out her real world for a huge block of the day.
And that’s where I am today. Today is another one of those perfectly blended days. I have some early calls, a presentation I need to build for a client, some procedures I need to write for another client and a few virtual meetings for future work. We also have 16 cucumbers in the garden that need pickling and some tomatoes that need picking. I need to call the concrete shop where they are building my new vanity and concrete farmhouse sink and confirm dimensions for the renovation of our powder room. I want to get in a good walk today, make dinner and update both the hours calculation on my computer for my billable time this month and my grocery list on my phone.
Life, as you can see, is still busy and complicated. In fact, the way we live is not easier by any stretch of the imagination. But it is calm. I can get keyed up in my meetings – particularly the one coming up in just a few minutes – but it’s hard to stay that way when you go out to carefully pick cucumbers or tomatoes. This presentation I’m building has proved rather tricky, but it is amazing the clarity one gets when out for a walk. The struggle I’m having with “how” to say something seems to magically appear somewhere around that first mile.
I think, if I can finally try to describe the changes in my life it in a way that makes sense is that the ebb and flow of life is so much more calm. Instead of harsh waves crashing onto the shore with each changing of the tides from home to work and work to home, it’s a consistent gentle flow. The waves can still crash now and again and that’s okay, because it doesn’t happen all that often. But, in the meantime, life assumes a much more natural rhythm, a greater balance of work and life and a soothing calm that can only happen for me at home.
It’s been an evolution for me. When I first started thinking about working part-time and from home, I thought in terms of the concrete – the how, what, when and where – of work. (The“why” I hard already figured out.) But, as time has gone on and I’ve completed this transition, it’s no longer about the concrete and more about the intangible benefits: the peace of mind, flexibility and the ability to return to a more home-centered life.
Today it’s about power points and cucumbers. Tomorrow – as I peak ahead – it’s about Zoom meetings and making weekend plans. And in future, I have confidence that it will be this natural ebb and flow. Work and home and home and work. Somehow, these two huge elements of my life have come together naturally. I shall be forever grateful for that.
The Yuppie Homesteader 