It seems like lately, everyone is getting all existentially-angsty about work.  I blame gas prices.  (Just kidding!  Mostly…)

Apparently, a lot of folks on the web are pondering work/life balance, the cost vs. benefit analysis of commuting, and how the nature of employment itself is changing. This is a topic that is only going to continue to spur discussion and debate.

The personal, economic, and environmental cost of commuting is skyrocketing.  The influence of social media, greater access to increasingly better connectivity tools, and some fundamental, generational changes in the way we think about work means that it’s time to strap in, bunkies.  The ride is going to get interesting.

The work world is changing, fast, and we’re all trying to figure out the new world order before it’s even here yet.

After writing my last post about losing touch with what keeps my work life vibrant and healthy, I caught several posts by other bloggers along similar themes.

• Nataly at Work It, Mom mentions that despite the increase in people working two jobs, Gen Y (and I personally think you have to include Gen X here as well) claim to value work/life balance more than previous generations.
• One of my favorite PR/Social Media bloggers Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent uses Daniel Lanois as an example of letting passion infuse your work life, and the rich rewards that come from that.
• Over on Sparkplugging, Dawud Miracle talks about how constantly asking yourself why you’re doing what you do is important to maintaining motivation in your work.

“…‘why’ is the question that gives meaning, that gives life, to your work. Why is the motivating factor that makes us consider our impact in the world.”

• Monika Mundell at The Writer’s Manifesto, in a post about finding streamlined, distraction-free writing tools, even added a little bit of work/life balance pondering.

“Since my workload is pretty much full all the time I don’t have much room for lost time. Of course this is between me working and trying to keep a balance with a social live, time spent with my husband and my beloved pets.”

• Power blogger Chris Brogan had a recent post where he, too, was threading some trends together that related to work/life balance, telecommuting, and the slightly more slippery idea of sharing your personal brand with your employer.

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This is something of a sidebar, but I’ll admit that last idea is really intriguing to me.  Over the last year or so, I’ve slowly (and probably sloppily) been trying to create my own personal brand, because I think I’ve instinctively understood that having a recognizable, respected personal brand in my field makes me a better asset for an employer.

(Awkward pause as I acknowledge that it makes me a better asset for an employer, until I leave their employment…  okay, moving on.)

On second thought, that’s not entirely true.  I think that if you achieve recognition and respect as an individual, I don’t think the value of that exits as soon as you exit a company’s payroll.  Particularly if you’ve represented them well on the social web, and leave on good terms.

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But back to the main thread in all this. Many people are clearly wrestling with the desire to create a vibrant, passionate work life that doesn’t detract from your other most treasured values–whether it’s the value they place on spending adequate time with their families, the value they place on their environmental impact, or the value they place on determining an equitable relationship with their employer.

I just think it’s interesting how this soulful, work-related wrestling has popped up in posts about mostly seemingly unrelated things.  Which reminds me of another interesting, thought-provoking post from Chris Garrett.

Like it or not, your inner “stuff” tends to leak out. It does that in real world conversations, and it most certainly does in blogging, which is an intrinsically personal form of writing.

Half the time, when I’m reading the posts in my feed, I’m not so much reading what the post is ostensibly about (there are, after all, only so many posts a woman can digest on blogging tips.)  Chris’ post helped me realize that much of the time, I’m actually reading these posts for the “between the lines,” ulterior conversation.  Taken in aggregate, those “off topic” musings are the song of the zeitgeist, and tell you much about what’s going on in the anima mundi (”soul of the world”).

On a more personal note, I’m planning a little “work life balance” adjustment this weekend, going on an overnight with my sisters to a remote undisclosed location.  My understanding is that there will be massages, cocktails, chick flicks, and a lot of conversation–not necessarily in that order.

See you all when I get back.

img courtesy of MeHere on SXC

I was a cranky Kat last week.  Come to think of it, I was kind of cranky the week before that, too.  I think I realized tonight what was making me Mrs. Cranky McNastypants.

I stopped having fun.

Ironically, somewhere in the last year or so, just as I found myself in the admittedly enviable position of being able to do what I really enjoy for a living, I stopped enjoying it.  I was so darned determined to prove to people that I’m good at what I do, I turned what should have been a calling into a “job.”

When you’re in your calling, what you feel should mostly be joy.  Something about the work connects with something deep inside you.  You’re doing what you were made to do, and that should feel good.  And I know this because I have felt that over the last year or so.  But for the last few months, it was becoming less frequent, just as the progression of events in my vocational life should have made it more often.

I’m not saying you don’t have aggravations and frustrations when you’re working in your calling.  There will always be jerks, and weenies, and infuriating technical snafus.  But I wasn’t enjoying the work itself.  It had become labor.

I did a little etymological research.  The root for the word “work” is related to “activity” and “accomplishment.”  “Vocation” comes from the root word for “voice”–meaning something is calling to you; which is why “vocation” and “calling” are such close synonyms.  “Labor,” however, comes from a root word that means “totter, slip, or sleep.”

When you’re awake to your calling, your work does give you a sense of accomplishment.  You feel that you’re getting somewhere, that you’re completing your opus, or at least contributing to it.  But when you’re slipping out of touch with your soul, your deep inner self, you totter into labor, and you lose consciousness of why you’re putting forth that effort.

Okay, enough with the big words and the heavy stuff. That’s not the main point of this post.

Have I ever told you the story of how I got involved in social media, online communities, and blogging in the first place?  No?  Maybe elsewhere?  It’s an interesting story, that.  I’ll probably share it here soon.

At any rate, there was a time when talking with other folks online, getting to know them and letting them get to know me, was fun.  Sharing stories and hearing what people had to say about them was fun.  Figuring out how to write a title so that people absopositivenlutely had to click on it and read the post, was fun.    Learning and teaching and mentoring and being mentored online was fun.

And then, sometime after I started getting paid to do those things, I think the guilt hit.  I love my parents and grandparents, but quite frankly, growing up I got the very strong impression that work was supposed to be a miserable, hard, difficult thing.  If it wasn’t, you probably weren’t doing it right.  Or, more to the point, if it wasn’t, you were probably not putting in a hard day’s work.  This meant you were, as my granny would say, a hippie.  Or just plain lazy. Let’s just say my elders did not really grok Csizsentmihaly’s concept of flow.

I also have a large number of loved ones who would very much like to be doing something they really enjoyed for a living.   As much as they’ve tried to be happy for me as my vocational life kept getting better, I can’t help but feel an undercurrent of envy.  Whether it’s a true reflection of their feelings or not, I kept imagining them thinking “What on earth did she do to deserve this?”  So anyway.  Guilt.  Lotta guilt.

I started trying to make my work seem more like, well, work.  I got deadly flipping serious.  About everything.  I lost the playfulness, sense of exploration and lighthearted curiosity that made this work my métier in the first place.

Part of this is a function of my personality type.  When I’m in a healthy place, my humor and idealism shine through.  When I’m in a less-healthy spot, I get increasingly “heavy” (metaphorically, spiritually and physically–I gain weight when I’m down).

So this week, I’m resolving to unload the guilt, recapture my joy and start having fun again.  Online.  Offline.  At work.  In my marriage.  With my kids.  With my other relationships.

Because truthfully, that’s the only way I can be really good at any of those things.

img courtesy simmbarb on sxc.hu

Pownce friend Michele Lentz sent this out, and I found it a bit intriguing and blog-worthy.  Apparently, the founder of Monster.com is ready to move on from one major life event (career transitions) to another (death).

This blog is all about stories, especially personal stories, so obituaries are actually something relevant.  In my first job out of high school, I was a small town radio DJ.  One of my most important duties (after keeping the GM from putting his foot in his mouth) was reading off the obits as part of the noon news report.  You want to seriously torque off small town old people?  Mess up an obituary.  That’s all I’m saying. The phones will ring, and you will spend 20 minutes getting dressed down for leaving out the deceased’s second cousin once removed who “stayed with her every day three years ago when she was down with the cancer.”

Sorry.  I digress.  For what it’s worth, my own life experiences eventually taught me to appreciate why it was so important to those folks that I get the obituaries right.

Anyway… local publications have always printed obituaries, obits drive a certain number of subscriptions, so to a certain extent, publishers have always profited from these notices.  Taylor may be doing so a bit more directly, but the fact remains, that those who serve the bereaved professionally in some capacity are essentially profiting from death.

That’s not what I really wanted to talk about here, though.  Whether you like what Jeff Taylor is doing or not, some time in your life, your name will likely be in the “survived by” list for someone close to you.  In the last four or five years, I’ve personally lost my mom, my grandpa, and my grandma  (all three to tobacco-related illness;  so, yes, I basically think Tobacco Companies = Satan).  I’ve also lost to some aunts, uncles, and other more distant relations over the years.

Bereavement is a really difficult life passage.  Obituaries aren’t really for the deceased; they’re for the bereaved.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  stories are how we process and contextualize our lives.  We find the meaning for our little adventures here on earth by telling ourselves the story of those adventures.  Sometimes they are comic and sometimes they are tragic, and sometimes a mixture of both.  An obituary is effectively the epilogue of someone’s story, told for the benefit of those left behind.

We need an ending, or in psychology-speak, we need “closure,” when someone we love’s story is cut off.  Obituaries and other memorials are symbolic “endings” that help us process the loss.  My theory is that our souls, being eternal, don’t really ”get” death.  They need symbols to make sense of what has happened.

During my mother’s passing, the funeral home and both newspapers which printed her obituary misspelled her name.  Despite the great care we took to spell her unusual name and have the spelling read back to us, both the funeral home and the Courier-Journal actually misspelled both her first and last names (there was no listing for “Reginia Beckham”–just “Regina Beckman”).  In an already painful time, it was an insult added to injury.  I tried to contact an editor at the C-J for a correction, but got no response, and eventually decided a correction wouldn’t really make a difference.

It’s a small thing, really, but at the time it loomed a lot larger.  And it made me sorry for the way I had mentally blown-off those callers back when I was a know-it-all 18 year old deejay.