CFC INSIGHTS: "Sittin' at the rest stop..."
Today is the last day of one chapter of our friend Brinton Johns formal investing career.
As a member of this community, Brinton offered to write reflections as he walks through this doorway to start a new journey. We thought these reflections would serve multiple purposes: perhaps provoking helpful thinking to all of you in our community, perhaps providing Brinton a useful outlet to put his thoughts to writing while he is in this new experience, and perhaps offer all of us a collective language, so-to-speak, as we read and reflect on these pieces together.
The first part of this year at the Community for Change has had an emphasis on foundational attributes that can help each one of us serve more powerfully: we continued working lunches in services to NGO's and social enterprises, but also held Zoom meet ups on racism, creativity, freedom, and in June, listening.
I know Brinton's writing will add to the constant care and work at our most human, foundational level. The work that helps us reflect, respond, and serve. This first piece in particular is one I've earmarked to send to friends, to print out one day when my children experience something similar. I hope you will enjoy it too.
And Brinton...can't wait to see where you "quantum leap in spacetime" next.
Brynne
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My last day is Friday. After 17 years, mountains of work, monumental personal change and a meandering path I couldn’t have imagined all those years ago, I’ll sit at my desk for the last time this week. It’s been coming for a while. I’ve already slowed down as others have taken my roles. There are so many “good” things I could write about. But this morning I’d like to write about one of my feelings involved in the process.
Have you ever taken a road trip with kids? You’re jamming down the road, passing people, making “good” time — and then: “Daddy, Mommy — I’ve got to go to the bathroom!”. If you’re anything like me, you see the next rest stop is just down the road, reluctantly pull off . . . and start the painful process of watching cars go by for what seems like an eternity. First you watch the semis you passed 10 minutes ago whiz by, then you recognize a truck pulling a trailer full of four wheelers. Finally, even the beater mini van with a mattress tied to the roof comes by. You think, “Not the mattress guy! I passed him three hours ago! What could possibly be taking so long?”
I don’t know where I'll go next. I haven’t figured that part out yet. I’m just taking a break. I feel the pull of the rest stop and I’ve decided to listen to it. I don’t think I realized it before, but not knowing where you’ll go next is sort of culturally weird (and just not an option for most people - I get that). When I talk to people about it, they sort of cock their head a funky direction and say, “Well, congratulations on your retirement.” They mean well, but the word “retirement” feels like a death sentence. It sticks in my craw. It took an entire industry to invent such a concept.
There are a lot of good connotations in the word, but right now I can only see the bad ones. Productive years behind you, shopping at Walmart at 9:30 on a weekday morning, getting hooked on daytime soap operas. Lack of purpose. Insignficance.
And here’s where the analogy breaks down:
Among my favorite subjects to think about, but very difficult for the human brain to hold onto, is that of non-linearity. While my feeling of growing insignificance is very real, it’s not very realistic. The rest stop analogy that keeps playing in my head is inherently linear. I get on the highway, go a set rate of speed, take breaks to get gas and go to the bathroom. Plus or minus a pretty tight deviation, I can basically calculate what time I’ll get to the destination. My brain “gets” it. I can convince myself that outcomes are predictable.
But life doesn’t work that way. We don’t take significant breaks to get back on the highway and go the speed limit again. We take breaks to remind ourselves that we’re not on a highway. We're swimming around in multi-dimensional spacetime. We take breaks to disrupt the linearity and realize that the answer is perhaps not a fixed point, but a galaxy of possibility.
So while I coast to a stop and pull this car over, I FEEL a growing sense of insignificance as I watch others pass me on the track that I’ve been on for so long. BUT, as I rest, soak in the sunlight, listen to the sound of crickets in the field of sunflowers behind the rest stop, hear the bees flit about; I understand there’s an entire universe beyond the interstate. We're not connecting dots on a plane, we're quantum leaping around spacetime.
I don’t know where this will lead. The process is uncomfortable. It renders the illusion of prediction useless. It takes away our warm-fuzzy measurement sticks. We are forced to redefine purpose. It’s a process of surrender.