“Houston, We’ve Lost Contact.”

Happy New Year! And while I’m at it, Happy Easter, Happy Memorial, Independence and Labor Day, Happy Halloween and Thanksgiving, and Merry Christmas, Hanukah, etc. That covers most of the holidays that came and went since my last blog entry. I wish I could tell you that I’ve been feverishly writing this entire time… so absolutely absorbed in the task that I couldn’t be bothered with updating a blog. However the truth is just slightly less exciting.

I couldn’t possibly give a proper update on nine months of activity in a single blog entry, so my plan is to make several entries this month to both chronicle my experience as well as get back into writing mode. I closed my last entry with a quote about feeling hurried if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do. Ironically that very much played into my 2011 experience. I may even delve into the unexpectedly deep end of “what you’re supposed to do.”

Just after my last entry, my wife Meghan and I embarked on a vacation to Australia. It was a fabulous two-week experience that we both had considered for many years. Finally our finances and available vacation time aligned in such a way that we could make it happen. I won’t detail much about the trip, but I will say a top memory was being in the ocean, not once but twice, in the very near presence of a whitetip reef shark. I couldn’t find any good pictures showing teeth, but I swear I saw them when the first one swam within about five feet of my shoulder while snorkeling. It’s also unfortunate that I didn’t know that they are rarely aggressive or that there are no recorded human deaths at the jaws of this particular type. It was basically a totally visceral, “Oh My God! That’s a Shark!” followed by rapid swimming in the opposite direction. Well, for the first five seconds at least. After I saw another snorkeler turn and give chase, I figured, “Hey, maybe it’s not hostile… or I can watch this guy get eaten!”

Upon returning from that trip, I only had a few weeks before I was scheduled to, well... take another holiday. This time it was the annual golf trip, which is usually around five days. This is starting to sound a little like bragging, but there’s a point to all this. During that two week non-vacation period while I was barely trying to get back to being an author, I was contacted by my former employer. They were looking for someone to do some contract work and my name came up. I can honestly say that my instinctive “no” response was only slightly less powerful than my reaction to meeting my first shark. They asked if I knew anyone and to get back to them. Of course, I could think about it too.

Now, having someone ask if you would like to earn some money, right in-between two tightly planned vacations, does make one start to think about what one “should” be doing. I shared the news with my wife before I really thought much about it and was still pretty convinced that there was no way I should go down that route. Meghan has been beyond amazing when it comes to supporting my efforts at writing and she’s never discouraged that pursuit. As it turned out, she was able to ask the most pragmatic of questions that hadn’t even entered the initial conversation with my work contact, “How much were they offering?” I indicated I didn’t know. “Don’t you even want to ask?”

And that’s how I accepted a 10-week contract offer that turned out to be closer to five months. It was literally an offer I couldn’t refuse. And while I don’t regret it in the slightest, it is nearly impossible for me to answer the question, “What should I have been doing?” On one level, if I believe this book is the most important thing I can be doing, how can that not be the answer? On another level, survival does require funding and securing more funds is sometimes necessary. Especially if you fly to the other side of the planet for sight-seeing. I guess I’m still too… unenlightened, to feel that I should skip those vacations to eliminate the need for additional income and thus stay on task.

Perhaps the best answer to what we should all be doing is, “We should always be living; Sometimes for ourselves, as often as we can for others.” Each of us decides how we meet those objectives and whether or not we succeed. Lest we forget that regardless of how we arrive at our determination of “What we should be doing,” we’re the ones that establish the answer. And we’re always free to reevaluate and rework those determinations.

See you here soon!