Living By Design

   "How's the job search going?" "Have you found a job yet?" "Have you found something full-time yet?"
     I'm not quite sure how to answer these questions. Part of the problem is that I'm not actively looking. While I do have a part-time job at a place where I am very happy, I am keeping an eye out in case I find another part-time job in a good place.
    I'm afraid what people will say or think if I tell them this. I wonder if  I'll be branded as lazy, not ambitious or being too picky. I'm worried that if I'm not seen to be looking really hard for something full time that people might think less of me.
   When I left my job I assessed the job market and realized something. The full-time jobs were in corporate pharmacies. They were jobs in companies that have reputations for burning out their employees and them dumping them. I really don't want to be a part of that. I wanted to work for a place that was smaller and not a large corporation. If it was a bigger business then I would want it to be a place where the main office is in Minnesota. I want to work someplace that values the contributions of its employees and where experience is considered an asset. It was very possible that a full-time job like the one I had left was no longer possible for me.
   For a while, this seemed pretty scary. I had always worked full-time. What was I going to do if I didn't work full time? How are we going to manage?
   C and I sat down and crunched a few numbers. We discovered that by paring down a few expenses that we should have pared down a long time ago, we could live just fine on a part-time pharmacist salary. This brings up a new challenge. What am I going to do with my new found free time?
   My mind went back to a speech that Marie, a member of my Toastmaster's club, gave. In it, she talked about living by design instead of living by default. Living by design means thinking about your life and what is important to you. It means structuring your life so you have time to do the things that you think are important. A few weeks after this speech another member gave a speech about simplifying his life. He also talked about making time for those things that he felt are important.
   What I have is an opportunity to change my life. For the first time in 24 years, I have time to do things I've never been able to before.
   I can do volunteer work. I can see if it would be possible to teach in a community college's pharmacy tech program. I could do more work for the church. I could find an elderly person who is alone and needs help and adopt them.
  In other words, I can design my life. Actually, because I am a Christian, it would be more correct for me to say that I want to seek the will of the Lord. I'm wondering if there is other work He wants me to do.
   One of the things I've been doing recently is going through old cards, letters and pictures. There are too many for me to read all of them. I have read a few. I'm getting a picture of the kind of person that I was back in college and when I first started working. I had forgotten. I used to be a lot less scared.  I used to stand up for what I believed in. A lot of people liked and respected me. They took time to write letters to me and as far as I can tell, I would write back. You could probably make a book of all the letters I've written.
  I had forgotten that I was this way. I had forgotten that I once had a sense of humour. I had forgotten that I could laugh at myself. That I wasn't so rigid. I wasn't so scared.
  I believe that there is something out there for me to do. Something that requires the talents that I've gathered over the course of the years. I believe that I need to become a bit more like the person I was 20 years ago.
   I have an opportunity to create a new life for myself. I just need to figure out what I want it to be.....