Mid-life Unwinding
My wife and I spent the weekend working on our house. We just had all the 2nd floor painted – turned all the oak white. We were switching out all the electrical outlets and switches to more modern white plugs and switches and listening to Pandora.
I suggested we listened to an audiobook. “Which one?” I was surprised that she even considered it.
I read to her my whole list. “How did we ever end up together?” was her reply.
She agreed to listed to The Gifts of Imperfection. After all, I reminded her, it was her choice and I hadn’t listened to it yet.
There was a part of this book that caught my attention. The author talked about a “mid-life unwinding”. She said a lot of people call it a crisis, but it is more of an unwinding. It’s a time when we start to realize who we really are deep inside and what we want.
“See!”, I said, “I’m not having a crisis, I’m having an unwinding!”
My wife had just accused me the day before of having a mid-life crisis because I had mentioned I want to move somewhere far away – like to Tennessee.
She thinks I’m nuts. Neither of us have lived outside of Utah, except for me, when I spent two years living in South Africa as an LDS Missionary. I loved the experience and I often wonder if I’ll ever experience anything like it again.
Why Tennessee? It’s funny, before getting my mission call, I would tell people (jokingly), I will go anywhere the Lord wants to send me, except Nashville Tennessee. It was simply because I HATE country music. It makes my ears bleed.
But, Dave Ramsey is in Tennessee and I hear he is in desperate need of web developers. I’ve been doing web development for over 15 years so I’m sure I could help him out.
But my wife is right. I am nuts. I work for the best company in Utah. There is no other company in this state that I know of that comes close to matching Neutron’s perks and benefits. The only one I’ve heard that comes close is Digicert because they take all their employees to Disneyland! But, I don’t know how their other benefits compare.
Yeah, Dave’s team uses Ruby, which IMHO is inferior to Python, but he obviously wouldn’t have known that and must have been led astray by his development team ;). That said, Ruby/Rails is the next best thing to Python/Django and it is a far cry better than Cold Fusion, which is also part of their technology stack.
I’m 99% positive it will ever happen. I haven’t even applied or sent them a resume. Plus my wife is totally against it. I even suggested only moving for two years. She thinks that is ridiculous. “And while you’re at work meeting new people, I’m stuck at home in a strange new area with 4 kids and no friends or family to talk to?” Yeah, I didn’t have a good comeback for that one.
What do you think? Am I nuts? Have you ever had the urge to do something illogical and crazy? Did you go through with it? I’d love to hear some of your stories!