A few weeks before I left my last employment, things were getting interesting. It felt like I still had so many months to go, that I eagerly shared more ideas and plans to coworkers. Yet I knew I had to prepare for a closure. Meanwhile, new joiners kept coming, to whom I had to do an introduction-goodbye session almost every week.
“So, you’re going to follow your husband, to be a traditional wife?” Someone responded to my intro-goodbye. I understood, he just joined and he didn’t know much about me. As we were in South-East Asia, culturally I knew what he meant with “traditional wife”.
Knowing me jumping so far to another continent, some professional contacts got in touch with me wondering what I was doing with the jump. Those who used to work intensely with me knew what to ask. They knew that I do things one by one. I am not a multitasker lest I lose my focus, and far from being ambitious (even that translates to being naively optimistic).
“How are you doing?”
“What are you doing these days?”
I answered with my usual astonishment of random experiences. Learning to navigate financially in a capitalist country, or learning to literally navigate the streets without public transport, were among the answers.
Those who knew me well would congratulate me for the good break, the quiet small-town living, or simply looking forward to more stories from me. Yes, I do have many stories to tell just by digging into my life purpose.
Have you ever questioned your purpose in life? It contains the dots we can connect backward in life, helping us see the common theme that is ever emerging, stronger as we progress in life.
Some of us are lucky enough to know it at a very young age, but don’t worry if you feel like you don’t know it by now. You can allow yourself a couple of good breaks to have good reflections in order to connect the dots and see the emerging theme.
How did I find yet another set of dots in the past year? By encountering another ego death moment. Depending on which branch of knowledge (psychology, spiritual, or science) to explain, it means many things. Basically, it’s a complete loss of subjective self-identity, although only temporarily.
I have two subjective self-identities. One is on my online profiles, and one is what I present to my small circle of family and friends. With the ego death, I could detach myself from both identities, and explored my ultimate, unworldly one. Something that I only share with my significant other.
Since I encountered my first ego death several years ago, I learned to appreciate a period where I have a full-time job to observe myself and focus on what’s going on in my life. That is why I appreciate the moment of being a “traditional wife”. It’s a period where— because of the ego death — my fear of uncertain future is gone. I am all over the past, present, and future.
Knowing the benefit of having such a period in my career-defined adult life, I disagree with the advice that career counselors give to young people, “Do not leave a gap in your resume”. The gap is treated in such a way that the life experience during the gap is to be dismissed, while actually it can contribute a lot to the person’s growth, possibly beneficial to future employers.
Meanwhile, job recruiters tend to over-analyze resumes, “What you did is not exactly what we want you to do”. Even that is not the way we recognize the passionately curious people (confirmed in my intense hiring experience). Dismissing an unconventional list of experiences on paper means losing an opportunity talking to a potential candidate with broad perspectives.
I guess, young people are free to list non-career activities in their resume, as long as they can share what they learn from those activities. Why don’t employers allow young employees to take a year off through an unpaid leave, just like new mothers (in certain countries) can take 1–3 years of paid parental leave?
That is the time to apply to a full-time job as an observer of your own life. Make it part of your career. It makes you see your life as a forest, not a group of trees. And you’ll get an additional benefit: seeing your life direction, as if your life is a stream of water.
We follow life as it progresses, just like canoeing in a river. We don’t let the canoe drift without paddling a.k.a. we need to keep making an effort, but we also don’t try going upstream for the sake of going north. Trying too busy to paddle rigorously will only make us oblivious to the little nudges that life gives us, because it’s like the little stones in the water that may cause the canoe to get stuck. You really need to pause in order to get it unstuck.
Whatever plans we have, when they’re executed according to the stream of our life, it will work. When it happens, it’s meant to happen. And when it’s meant to be, it happens so swiftly.
Life will always keep you “busy”. Life will not let you actually do nothing, because you can always make an effort to not let your day go by without meaning. Like I have always done so. Until today.
Time flies! Looking back at this past year, I’ve accomplished a lot. Backing off from pre-diabetes by returning my metabolic rate back to my 20’s level. Learning more about holistic healthcare by overcoming my body’s negative reaction to the food industry of twisted capitalism. First draft of a book. Adopted a cat. Done a project for a small community. Volunteering at two places ongoing.
Interestingly, certain people don’t see what I’ve done as real accomplishment, because it’s not resume worthy. Yes, they see that their career is the evidence of their life purpose. That is why I felt the need to share my story here. Maybe I’m too privileged to not see it that way? I feel like I’m too privileged that I’m able to count my privileges. It’s endless. D’oh.
Having spent many months writing this draft, I’m rather joyful to publish it now, a year since I began my job as the “traditional wife”. I remember responding to the resume-enthusiast who is ironically also a religious person, “I cannot take to the grave anything listed in my resume, as God judges only what we can take to death.”
I added, “Am I supposed to engrave my resume on my tombstone?”
My tombstone would probably say: “purpose materialized, love carried over”.
