Well, Spring is almost here in Key West and as far as I’m concerned, not a moment too soon. After one of the coldest winters in Key West history (right after I move here I might add.. grrrr), I’m ready to begin the tropical phase of my life.

I’m coming up on one year in Key West this June, and as I look back on the last nine months since moving here, I can still say with all certainty that I’ve definitely made the right choice.

I finally managed to secure employment after a gruesome 7 months of looking. It’s a great job doing computer graphics and color correction for a local photographer at his gallery. Right up my alley! I was completely convinced there near the end that I was going to have to get a job at Pizza Hut or McDonalds! I even applied at Home Depot, hey.. I’m a handy guy, I could certainly sell tools to people. I never heard back from them though, so I guess they didn’t share my optimism.

I’m not sure if the lack of good jobs in key west is due to the nature of the city, or the economy, or a combination of the two, but let me tell you, I was having some anxiety there near the end that Key West might spit me back out. I had read the “Quit your Job and Move to Key West” book (After I moved here, I might add), and there was an entire chapter on the realities of trying to live and work on the island. They stated quite clearly that Key West chooses the people it wants to live here, and jettisons the rest.. I laughed when I read that, but now I’m a believer. Thank you Cayo Hueso for letting me stay! I see a long and delightful future in the cards for us.

Where does the time go?

One of the largest differences in my life after finally getting a job, is the loss of all the FREE TIME! I mean, I’d worked full time for my entire life up until a couple years ago when I was laid off, and I always seemed to be able to get the things done on the weekends that I needed to. I never really felt like I was missing anything.

Now I feel like life is screaming by me, and all I’m doing is workin’ for the man again! It’s disturbing, and as much as I love having a job and making money again, I lament the time I had to sit around and gather my direction at my leisure.

I’ve labeled this phenomenon the ‘time slip’ (Not to be confused with the Time Warp, there’s no jumping to the left in the time slip). It’s the creeping feeling that you get in your gut when, after a period of enlightenment and personal growth, you start to realize how precious your life and personal happiness really are. How much your time is REALLY worth.

I felt the Time Slip strongly for the first time when I went to the Virgin Islands to stay on Water Island at a friends house for a week about four years ago. It didn’t hit until I got back to my life in Orlando, and returned to my soul-sucking corporate job. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but I knew that I’d been altered somehow, and my life in the city, and the corporate job that supported it, just weren’t cutting it anymore. Not by a long shot.

The feeling passed after a while, as I slipped back into the matrix and resumed my daily grind making other people rich. But the feeling sat in the pit of my stomach, just a small flicker of a flame, refusing to be put out.

Personal Expression

Now, maybe I’m just a conflicted person. Maybe I want it all. Maybe I’m being unrealistic, or maybe I just haven’t yet found my ultimate stride in life. But working for someone else again reminds me just how strong my desire to be self sufficient really is. Don’t get me wrong, I love this job, there’s no corporate BS, no staff meetings, it’s just me and a couple other folks. My boss is a super nice guy. But still I’m stressed out about it. Is it the work? Most certainly not, it’s a very easy and casual job, so that leads me to believe that what stresses me out about it is the lack of personal expression involved in working for other people.

I’m guessing that across the gamut of the types of people out there, from artist to construction worker to corporate number cruncher, that everyone has a different needs when it comes to personal expression. Some people are completely happy in a corporate job working for the man. They find their personal expression in the daily minutiae of how they do their jobs, or perhaps the have hobbies on the weekends that fulfill their needs. Maybe they have no desire for personal expression at all and spend their weekends playing golf. Who knows. But I’m convinced that these people have not yet, or perhaps never will experience the time slip. Is there anything wrong with that? I don’t know. I certainly can’t speak for the rest of the world, but it’s no good for me!

I crave personal expression like air itself. I need to build… to create.. to live my days immersed in stimulating, thought provoking, beautiful surroundings. I’m just not happy without that. I tried for years to find happiness in money and stability. Hey, you look around you when you’re growing up at the people who seem happy, and you follow their lead. I mean, it worked for them right? Hmm. Don’t think so.

My Friend Eric told me about his theory that society needs to go back to the barter system and people need to learn trades. He holds that today’s society is unbalanced because no one actually knows how to do anything anymore. Most people can’t even change a tire, let alone grow food, or build furniture.

I have to say, that when I think about it, it makes some sort of sense. At least to me.

So anyways

I’m rattling off course here. My point is that holding a job again has brought me to the realization that happiness (at least for me) involves self sufficiency and personal expression on a grand scale. I need to build, create, make people think.

I guess I’ve always known that what would really make me happiest would be to make a living creating art for myself in some fashion. I’ve dabbled with writing a novel, painting, photography, sculpture.. you name it, I’ve probably tried it. I think my next big step in life is to focus on developing a plan to reach financial independence. I’ve decided that working for someone else, even if not an unpleasant experience in and of itself, is a dead end street when you look at it closely.

Besides, how can I cruise into the sunset on my sailboat and disappear into the Caribbean if I have to be back to work on monday?

How do you make the decision to quit your job, sell your crap and move to Key West? You could decide to stand up and quit your miserable soul-sucking job in a blaze of adrenaline-fueled bravado, telling your boss to shove it where the sun don’t shine – or you could have that opportunity stripped from you and just get laid off – like me. While some people might look at being jobless in today’s economic slump as a pretty freaky thing, (it was for me for a few months), I ultimately decided to take the opportunity to redefine my life.

I was lucky in that my employer sent me off with a respectable severance package so I’d had a bit of a cushion. I decided to take some time soul-searching. Hell, no one in my industry was hiring, in fact they were all laying people off left and right, just like my old firm was, so there wasn’t much of a chance to get a job doing what I’d spent the last 20 years building skills for. I’d gone right from high school into a series of jobs that eventually led to a 20 year stint in the Community Planning industry doing Graphic Design for a lot of government redevelopment projects. Sitting in my home office the week after getting the axe, staring at the want ads in Monster and Job Finder, I had a striking revelation;

On paper I was pretty unimpressive to most employers wanting to hire a Graphic Artist.

Not only was most of my work pretty creatively stunted by the nature of the industry, but I’d focused on a pretty niche corner.. 3D modeling. I’d been very successful within my own industry, but without that industry, I had bupkis. Worse yet, I’d been so comfortable and complacent at my job, that I rarely saved any of my work into a place where I could pull it out and build a portfolio. So even if I had done some work that a potential employer would find relevant, I didn’t have the proof. Crap.

Did I even want to do that kind of work anymore?

I had another stumbling block rattling around in the back of my head. I didn’t think I even wanted to do Graphics anymore, but what else could I do? It’s all I’d ever done.

I knew that I really enjoyed writing. I also enjoyed creating artwork and sculpting. I was good with my hands, I could build just about anything, but who would hire me as a carpenter with no experience? I had literally no service industry experience, so I couldn’t get a job at any reputable restaurant, not that I have anything remotely resembling the correct personality to do that type of work even if I could.

I was flummoxed.

I stumbled on the door to freedom

One day about two weeks after getting laid off, as I sat staring at the want ads, sinking deeper into despair, the answer just fell into my lap. I’d been downloading a movie on the internet (I know, I’m a bad person, sue me), and it turned out to be not the movie I was looking for, but a video about the law of attraction. I’ve always been very much against self-help new-age existentialist crap, so I was pretty turned off, and also a bit peeved that I wasn’t able to veg out and enjoy the movie I had intended to watch. Sheer boredom compelled me to watch it however, and it wound up changing my life.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I thought the same thing, and it’s probably true. I was vulnerable and lost, and I latched onto the first thing that came along that gave me insight into a brighter future. Eh, so what, If it compelled me to get off my ass and start living the life I wanted, I don’t care how it found me.

Now, my BS meter is pretty hard to get past and I’m not a believer in organized religion, or organizations of any kind for that matter, I’m definitely not a joiner. But this was different, there’s no church, there’s no club, they didn’t ask for money.. they were just explaining this idea. This is an idea that has been around for hundreds upon hundreds of years, and it’s essentially a simple concept, you attract to your life that which you spend the most time thinking about.

After watching that video, I had an epiphany. I had been chasing a life that wasn’t resonating with who I really wanted to be. I didn’t want to be working for some corporate entity. I didn’t give a crap about furthering someone else’s agenda. I’d been focusing on security and stability, not personal growth. It was a wonder to me that I’d allowed it to go on for so long, but I think a big fancy corporate job is a bit like heroin or crack, it hooks you in and keeps you coming back all the while destroying you.

I had been living a life of fear

Fear of failing, fear of going broke, fear of losing friends, fear of not fitting in.. you name it. I was scared to death. The worst thing was that for all my life I had known that I’d wanted to be doing more of the things I truly enjoyed; writing, building, creating… I’d just decided at some point that there was no future in folly, and to be a responsible person, I had to get a decent job and advance within the firm. Gotta climb that ladder baby!

I’d picked a vocation based on one of my favorite things; art. The problem was I had to twist it, and squash it, and reduce it into something I could wring a living out of. Ultimately I’d taken something I loved and made a thing I hated. I subconsciously resented doing it of course, and the pain of that subconscious resentment manifested as an underlying thread of misery in my life.

I have no idea how i managed to do this. When I think back to my high school days, I remember being idealistic and driven. I was going to conquer the world. How I managed to fall so far is beyond me. I suspect it was a combination of things; laziness, fear, perceived responsibility to society, who knows. I do believe though, that it’s  akin to stepping into an ice luge. The first step is yours, the rest of the journey is just gravity. Stopping the downward slide is the hard part.

I was lucky enough to get spit out of the system because of a faulty economy, so I can’t take credit for making that decision on my own. There was no bravery involved; the decision was made for me. I can however make the decision to not get back on the ride. I wish I’d had the balls to make the decision on my own, but I’m not going to regret having that choice taken away from me, I’m past it and looking forward. I hope if you’re reading this and you are in a situation you wish were different, that you can stand up and demand better for yourself. As far as I know, we only get to do this life thing once, better not waste any time!

So there were decisions to make

Christina (My girlfriend) had also been laid off that year, and had been doing temp work for about nine months in an office downtown Orlando. I had taken a part-time job working with my friend Jeff at an art gallery to fill the days. We’d both become pretty hung up on this attraction business and were determined to decide what we wanted out of life and then go get it.

I have to admit that while I was the one to expose her to the attraction concept, Christina is better at it than I am. She built herself a dream board; essentially a bulletin board with photos of things she wanted in her life. We had been to Key West a few times, and loved it, but it wasn’t until we visited friends in the Virgin Islands that we really experienced the event horizon that would change everything. We were struck with a need to live in the Caribbean, on a sailboat! We knew we probably didn’t want to just pick up and move to St. Thomas directly, it’d be easier if we transitioned first and spent a few years in Key West learning to sail and acclimating to the island lifestyle and such. (It would be hard and brutal research I tell you).

On her dream board she put a photo of a sailboat, a photo of us in front of the Key West marina, a beach cruiser bicycle, and a fake 10,0000 dollar bill.

Long story short, four months later she’d applied for, been offered, and accepted a job in Key West. My work at the Gallery had oddly enough at just this time all but dried up.. another decision I wouldn’t be forced to make! I’d be out of work one way or another, so I may as well go to Key West!

We put the house up for rent, sold just about everything we owned (including my car), and threw what we did still have in a UHaul truck and hightailed it to Old Town where we’d found a cute little apartment just a week before.

Far from over!

So here I sit, no full-time job, living in key west, chasing a crazy dream of happiness and enlightenment.  I’ve decided to focus my energy on writing and hopefully inspiring people to chase their dreams in the process. I also expect to do a healthy amount of drinking in all the local bars and writing about that.

Sometime soon I’ll get a meaningless job to help pay bills until I become independently wealthy (haha), but I’m determined to stay away from any position where I’ll be expected to adhere to some corporate agenda that isn’t my own.

I think in this day and age, people have forgotten what it means to live a full meaningful life. Security and complacency have pushed us into jobs we don’t like, working for people we don’t respect, doing work we don’t enjoy.

I ran across this quote from Hellen Keller the other day, and I think it speaks volumes:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
- Helen Keller

So wether your dream is Key West, Montana, The Arctic Circle, or the girl next door.. go for it. Don’t let yourself wander around aimlessly scared to effect change.. go grab the life you want! It’s easier than you might think.