The being of nothingness

I had a moment of selfish zen this week. I was having breakfast at one of my favorite cafes in downtown Sunnyvale. Enjoying a breakfast burrito sitting at a table on the sidewalk at 8:30am with the temperature hovering near 70 degrees in February felt like meditating. I’ve enjoyed many breakfasts at this location, but my recently acquired freedom made this occasion especially exquisite. The street at that time of morning was mostly deserted, the exception being commuters scurrying past to get to the train station at the end of the block. I felt like a rock in a stream while the waters of the working day world flowed past me. At one point I saw a woman jogging towards me in the direction of the station in distress, apparently worried she was going to miss her train. I saw her coming at a distance and as she approached I made eye contact and unwittingly held it. Her expression was an odd mixture of facial entreaty regarding her predicament and frustrated hostility at this laggard staring at her from his relaxing sidewalk perch while her world was in chaos. For a moment I truly felt sad for her and wanted to call out “Stop! It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another way.” But as she buzzed past I felt sure my suggestion wouldn’t make sense or be believed. Besides, my breakfast burrito was waiting and starting to get cold.

Time, it is a changin'

Sorry for the lack of entries here. You have no idea how sense of time is distorted for me these days. I had started a new post last weekend and it only seemed like a day or so since then that it was aging and waiting for final review to post. Now I realize that day for the rest of you was a week. Time dilation is an ongoing problem I can see. It's a very regular occurrence for me to make off-by-one calendar mistakes or to completely forget what day of the week it is. My accuracy as far as time granularity is fast approaching the level of I still know what month it is. I expect that soon to morph into I know what season it is. 

The retirement week in review

It's been 9 days since I left work and it feels like a month. Tonight I turned on the TV to look for a weeknight show I thought was on and only then realized it was Sunday. A part of the time uncertainty comes from being in the altered reality that is the real estate market in Silicon Valley. We listed our house officially on the Monday of my last week at Google. By this past Tuesday after 8 days we had accepted an offer and were in escrow. It took me longer to sell some of my old furniture on the internal MTV for-sale group at work. Despite the fast pace of the execution, psychologically it felt like the whole thing was happening in slow motion. Also the loss of awareness of the passage of time is in part because I have allowed myself the luxury of leaving large swaths of my day unscheduled and picking up activities as I feel the urge. This is quite a bit different from other time off I've taken, including extended leaves of absence from work that I typically had intentionally well structured. My comfort level with this apparently lackadaisical state of affairs is something of interest to me, but neither because of regret about lowered productivity nor concerns about laziness. It just feels quite natural to me now to react to a given moment organically. So I might go from doing some packing for our move to reading the newspaper to taking a walk with the dogs to working on our new financial plan to...taking a nap. I expect this to change some as we reinvent our lives and get plugged into a whole new set of pursuits. But right now we can't really pursue all the things we have slated for investigation to fill our time. So this is how I'm reacting to the welcome problem of having spare time.

The first 4 days are the hardest

It took 4 days of retirement before I came back to Google as a guest for lunch, but it's not as bad as it sounds (unless you don't think that sounds bad in which case please skip to the next blog entry). My old team was hosting a conference and there were staff from the team from New York that I had not seen in person to say farewell since my announcement. So it was a chance to connect face to face as it may be the last time I see some of them. And well, there was also a team dinner that I got invited to after the conference, and that was special social event so I felt an obligation to participate. And I have additional Google lunches scheduled this week and next with people I haven't seen in awhile. Ok, after 10+ years at Google I might be a free food junkie. You just don't quit cold turkey. Mmmmmmm, turrrrrkeeeeey.

While I was back in the office I did take time to walk around as much as possible which led me to run into folks I hadn't had the opportunity to talk to directly in the last few weeks at work. So I had numerous serendipitous last chance farewells that extended the astounding amount of good will I'd been experiencing in my final days. Plus I got to cruise the pods on my floor dropping in on well established appreciative audiences for one last shot of ego juice as I entertained the troops. Nothing makes leaving more palatable than leaving 'em with a smile on their faces. It's probably at the top of my list of things I will miss most. 

Today is the first day of the best of my wife

I couldn't start the first blog entry of my retirement with something as trite as "Today is the first day of the rest of my life". So I started munging the words initially as quirky joke until I hit on this one, which isn't a title that is completely without relevance. My day started with a rustling near me as I lay in bed enjoying the warmth and lack of a schedule to drive me to get up. When I opened my eyes, through the blur I saw Dona standing there with a tray on which was a smoothie, coffee, and the paper. She has been positively giddy about me retiring and decided to demonstrate that enthusiasm. So she started out my day 1 quite special.

This blog has been long dormant since I started it in 2006 as an experiment. I soon realized I wasn't so good at talking about myself unless it was in person. But I'm resurrecting it as the channel for my thoughts for the time being until Dona and I can set up something new that's more of a collaborative effort to document what happens with us in the next phase. I'll do my best to keep it meaningful and not just a diary of activity. But as a disclaimer please note the tag line that accompanies the name of this blog. It's likely at times to degenerate into bleatings and musings of questionable value beyond entertainment. You may experience dizziness, nausea, hair loss, reduced sexual desire, or explosive diarrhea. It's possible you may experience some of these things simultaneously.

That being said I hope we all have fun.