Friday, September 29, 2017
When one chapter ends, another begins
One of the side effects of being a story-teller is that you’re constantly looking at life as if it was a novel and trying to arrange the things that happen to you into neat little narrative threads as if you were a character in one of your own stories.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t always cooperate. It’s a messy affair, filled with disjointed and often unrelated scenes, unresolved themes and/or plot threads that wind up going nowhere.
But every once in a while, life seems to imitate art -- or is it art imitating life? -- and things happen in such a way that even the most oblivious English Lit major can’t help but see the theme a heavy-handed author is trying to get across to his or her reader.
Well one of those moments happened to me last week. After almost 21 years, I left -- or was kicked-out of (depending on your point of view) – the company I have spent a good portion of my adult life working for.
Losing a job is a dramatic event in and of itself. And being laid off with half of your colleagues because the company you’ve put so much blood, sweat and tears into was sold only heightens the matter.
But that wasn’t solely the cause of my “living inside my own novel” moment.
My last day happened to coincide with the start of the Jewish high holy days.
For those not in the know, the period between Rosh Hashanah -- the Jewish New Year -- and Yom Kippur -- the day of atonement -- is a time of both endings and beginnings where Jews all over the world reflect back on the year that’s been and prepare for the year ahead. So the fact that I was leaving one job and starting another during this period seemed like a “happy” coincidence.
I put happy here in quotes, because leaving a job I’ve had for so long and having to say goodbye to one of the nicest groups of people I have ever worked with was certainly very sad. And like the closing of the old year we mark on Rosh Hashanah eve, it was certainly a very definite ending. It had me reflecting back on all the good – and sometimes not-so-good – times I had there.
To many, that event would mark the end of the story of their working life. For me however, it only marked the end of one (major) chapter of my life. Like turning the page in a book, a new chapter began for me the following Monday morning.
You see, I was lucky enough to get a three-month warning that the layoff was coming and I was even luckier to find what appears to be a better job before I was let go.
While thanking G-d, the ultimate author of all things, it dawned on me this was the perfect metaphor for Yom Kippur, which began the same week I started my new job. Because on Yom Kippur we Jews not only ask G-d to forgive all our sins, but also ask the Almighty to turn the page on our past and begin a new chapter for us in the Book of Life.
I’d like to believe the timing of this event was no accident. That it is a reminder that the “Great Author in the Sky” has a plan for all of us, even if -- like the characters in some of my stories -- we can’t always see where the plot is taking us from our limited perspective.
So to each and every one of you out there and to all my former colleagues who weren’t as lucky as me to immediately find a new job, may G-d inscribe you for nothing but blessings in the Book of Life for another year.
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