contributing

I like this jangly-nerve-endings, ready-to-work, time to Do Something feeling that has me in constant productive motion.

I am writing now, daily. It is a combination of paid work, grass-roots work, and unpaid release. It feels good, in every case, to get things out of my head and onto a screen. It feels great to produce, or to contribute something.

My sister always says the world is full of consumers and producers, and a life well-lived is a productive one. My grandmother, a woman of far fewer words and far less education, believed the same - though was too busy to comment on it.

I want to harness some of this energy for the mundane: clean the house, pack, tie up ends that have been loose for so long I have grown used to them in this state. Of course, that will only happen when there is no more avoiding it. We will have to leave for the trip, but precedent would suggest we will do so later than we want, with the house messier than I intended.

Between, among, and around summertime adventures and chores for the littles, I am job-hunting. To that end, I am actively networking for the first time ever - taking advantage of the interwoven threads of people I know and have known. I am savoring the intersections, loving the connections.

Looking for a job is forcing me to look back, to examine and evaluate 20 years in the workforce. (Go ahead. Gasp. I do.) I have to talk about it, think about it, offer it up as evidence. Doing so has me feeling, many days, surprisingly competent and reassured.

There is optimism to this thing I am doing now. There is a forward-looking sense that it will all be fine, and a retrospection I am capturing while in the middle of it: the threshold is all promise and possibility, and a thing worth savoring.