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While I don’t post regularly (life constraints and such), I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge hitting the ten year milestone for my first post on the site.

I started this blog with the aspiration of documenting my journey into paramedicine, since I knew one path to expertise is writing (digesting for clarity) and teaching (creating connections). At the time, I felt disengaged from work and was looking to bring better alignment between my interests and values. Over time, though, as my relationship with my partner deepened, as we became more financially entangled after getting engaged, as I was supporting her first steps into her professional career, and as we eventually started having children, it didn’t make sense for me to undergo a career reset. Instead, I found ways to better engage my values within my then current work and ensure I could meet our obligations to family and our finances.

Even though it’ll be ten years in January since acknowledging here that I was abandoning the path to paramedicine, I have (still) yet to change the title of this blog. I supposed it’s a bit of the charm – a kind of vestigial leftover from that time in my life. I created this blog during a time on the internet when monetizing blogs were the rage, and yet while I entertained the notion of benefitting financially from writing, I never put any serious effort into monetizing it or trying to keep a consistent brand. The blog reflected my mind in a lot of ways, jumping from education/learning/knowledge, to fitness, to habits, to reading and books, to cribbing Seth Godin’s style of thought leadership by way of micro-blogging. If there was a consistent theme, it was growth through personal development, experiments, and reflection. Until I finally land on something sufficiently creative and/or punny, the name is here to stay.

Many things have changed for me in life, and yet in a kind of George Lucas way, a lot is rhyming for me ten years on. I find myself at another career inflection point. Since getting let go from the college last year, the education sector is continuing to churn as the underbrush of detritus gets burned away after nearly a decade of making hay off the backs of international sunshine. It wasn’t the fault of the international students who came here for opportunity, and I truthfully don’t blame the colleges for exploiting a revenue source that masked chronic underfunding and investment from provincial and federal governments. Then, all at one, the tide went out and we saw that everyone was swimming naked. I was fortunate to find contract work last year, but as my contract comes to a close in a few months time, the sector hasn’t yet found solid footing to stabilize upon. So while the reason for my reflections on departing higher education isn’t the same as it was a decade ago, I am amused to find myself in a similar spot, empathizing with my younger self trying to figure out a path forward.

Whether I staying in post-secondary or not, the time I’ve spent here since deciding in 2017 to stick with it has been a great experience for me, full of growth and interesting puzzles to solve. I hope that in 2036 I’ll look back at this time as a period of intense and satisfying growth that shaped how the next decade will play out. It would be lovely, though, if on the edge of turning 50 I’m not at another inflection point of trying to figure out my next radical career pivot.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan