Life crafting, 2/23/15

There’s a concept I’ve been learning about in school called job crafting. The idea is exactly what it sounds like: create the job we want. It hinges on negotiation, hard work, and a vision for what success looks like. If we extrapolate the concepts of job crafting to life, we can assume that we create the life we want by asking for it and by being diligent about its specifications.

I have an offer to work in San Francisco this summer. I also have an offer to work in Minneapolis. And perhaps one in Denver, too. As you might recall from my post a week ago, I have a rather love/hate relationship with the Bay Area. I know what it would feel like in early morning gridlock on the 101. I know how my body would feel after a day of work on a yoga mat. I know how many layers I would wear to a Giants game. It’s oddly comforting to come home even to the things I dislike, to feel like my perpetual motion is temporarily stopped, and I can just breathe. I don’t have to start over. I don’t have to live off adrenaline anymore. And everything that will happen has been foretold. As I was leaving the Bay last year, I spent my last night in a redwood forest with my two best friends. One looked me in the eye and said, over my loud protestations, “I can’t explain it, but I feel like you’ll come back.”

So maybe I’ve always known. Maybe I’ll date the same weird boys. Maybe I will go to all the happy hours with all the software engineers. Maybe I will spend all the weekends hiking in Marin County, singing Queen off-key.

Or maybe I’ll move to Denver, where everything will feel new and there isn’t any attachment to the things I love. The adrenaline feels good. Everything has sharper edges when it’s new. I get a little taste of the manic, and I like it. I live among mountains, and I drive down roads I’ve never seen before. But look, I still don’t know if time is linear or not, and I still don’t know if I can do this life crafting thing alone or if I require direction. So maybe I’ll move to Minneapolis because I spent the first half of my twenties praying for guidance, and now that I’m my own guide, it feels unkind to move backwards. Which assumes, of course, that time is linear in the first place. Or, maybe time is linear but the choices I make are never as clearly defined as I think. As one of my dearest friends often repeats about regret, “there isn’t ever a choice to be made. You do what you need to do with the information you have at the time.” In other words, we life craft from the materials we have. The rice, the beans, the laughter, the traffic, the wind, the salary, the sex, the exhaustion, the frivolity, the sweat, the lies, and mostly, the appreciation for the glorious unknown.