Walk away

My decor sums me up pretty well...

L’avenir: cette excuse du temps
de nous faire peur;
projet trop vaste, morceau trop grand
pour la bouche du cœur

Qui t’aura jamais attendu, avenir?
Tout le monde s’en va.
Il te suffit d’approfondir
l’absence que l’on a.

-Ranier Maria Rilke

(For non-francophones, Rilke’s poem: The Future: time’s excuse to frighten us; too vast a project, too large a morsel for the heart’s mouth. Future, who won’t wait for you? Everyone is going there. It suffices you to deepen the absence that we are.)

The good news is that the good news hasn’t killed me. And as I doubt the snowmageddon will, there’s no real excuse to remain incommunicado.

I’ve been too exhausted this week to do anything except flop into air-mattress at night. First there was  the moving and unpacking, meeting three new roomies (and snooping in their junk mail to make sure I had their right names) and figuring out where they keep the forks.

Then there was the avalanche of HR paperwork, a new job and flurry of smiling coworker faces and then starting the second new job– some waterwings to keep my bank account afloat.

Plus, I’m still unpacking (I can’t seem to find any mittens) and trying to make time to catch up with all the lovely D.C. friends I haven’t seen in a few months.

But none of that really felt like the big turning point. What did was saying no to a job this week. It was the better job, the obvious choice– 9-5 with good benefits and friendly coworkers and a creative mission and room for an advancement and a pay-check about three times as big as I’m making now.

I thought about walking away– from the commitment I made to my new job, from an apartment and a life in Washington and ultimately, from journalism.

I told myself the things I told the search committee in the interview for the megawatt job: that telling good stories is what matter, not the medium. That the way we share information is converging and that the Web is about building strong communities and that maybe traditional journalism isn’t really leading the pack.

I do really believe those things, buzzwords and all. But I’ve wanted to be a journalist for about as long as I’ve been old enough to want to be something.

I don’t know how you walk away from that. I think it takes more courage than I’ve got.

The pro-con list was epic and the megawatt job had so many exciting possibilities. But in the end it was the money that kept rising to the surface.

I still want the chance do something because I want it, not because it’s prudent or particularly well-paid. I’m not in it for the money quite yet. I hope I’m right.

So, here’s Arcade Fire covering Talking Heads

“The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground, head in the sky
It’s okay, I know nothing’s wrong, nothing…

Never for money, always for love.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 5:48 pm and is filed under wealth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.