Metamorphosis

 

By Tom Poland

 

Examine Your Life and Transform It

 

The day after my column, “The Working Years,” ran, I received several emails from readers who saw in it a message. One reader wrote, “I loved your article describing your work history. Your article about reinventing yourself is one that everyone should examine.”

Another reader wrote, “Congrats on a great, thought-provoking piece. It really hit home with me, for many reasons. I grew up in a rural southern crossroads, late 50s, 60s, & 70s. I know I don’t have to tell you, things were so much different then.

“I am seriously tempted to take up your challenge to list every job I’ve had. I’m just afraid it would take at least a novel to accurately describe and account for all of them. The best part, to me, is your question: What did I learn from each one? You got me thinking. Thanks.”

Now and then something gets me to thinking too. News jars me into reviewing my life: the death of a friend, hearing that a former co-worker has made a great achievement, or hearing that someone who “had it all,” as the cliché goes, has taken his life. Things like this prompt me to take inventory of my life. I don’t think I am that different from you and so you probably ponder the same question I do. “Am I making the most of my life?”

People talk about their bucket list, those things they intend to do before departing life as we know it. For way too many the bucket begins to rust. It’s just too easy to let one day after another slip by without making any progress. Take book authorship. I cannot tell you how many times people approach me seeking a magic pill that enable them to write a book quickly and expertly. I tell them there is no easy way. As the old saying goes, “Everyone wants to be a writer, they just don’t want to write.”

“You just have to sit down and write,” I tell them. “Every day.”

I have a friend who has long talked about writing his memoir. Chief among his memories are his years in Vietnam. Not long ago I asked him how the book was coming along. “I haven’t had time to work on it,” he said. Last week he was diagnosed with cancer.

I know a fellow, one of the more pleasant people I’ve known, who works as a cashier at the grocery store where I shop. Imagine my astonishment upon learning that he gave up a career as an attorney to do something others would consider menial. He seems content, happy. Good for him. I don’t know why he left the legal world but James Dickey’s dad did the same thing. Sitting in a big wingback chair amid stacks of books, Dickey told me, “My father finally left the profession because he was so disgusted at all the loopholes and people getting off that he knew personally were guilty.”

Back in 2008 when the economy soured I knew a man who owned an exclusive men’s shop. As sales declined, he laid off employees. Finally, only he was left, and then he was forced to abandon the business he had inherited from his father. He transformed his life by taking a commercial trucker’s training course and today he drives an 18-wheeler across the United States.

Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

Just yesterday I ran across an old friend and former colleague. She once worked as an administrative assistant in a corporation but deep inside a desire to own her on business had long festered like a splinter that has to be removed. Out came the tweezers. Today, she owns a beautiful boutique selling things that make a house a home.

People transform themselves every day.

Metamorphosis … it could be happening to you right now. I read that every seven years the human body completes the change-out of every cell in it. Some say that’s a medical myth but what if it were true? What if we do become a “new” person every seven years. Myth or not, it prompted me to look at my life in seven-year stretches … one to eight, nine to sixteen … forty-four to fifty-one. Sure enough, I was a different person in each phase. How about you? Look at your life in seven-year segments. (Maybe there’s something to the fabled “seven-year itch” that ends many a union.)

Another way to examine your life is by the decades. I look back on the 1980s with particular fondness. Everything about that decade, for me, was good. It helped, of course, that I was young, footloose and fancy-free. For me, that illustrious decade began when an insolent woman hurled a box of fried chicken at me. I looked up and watched a leg, thigh, and wing sail by. As grease dribbled down the pine paneling, I thought, “I’m so out of here,” and I was. Thus began a decade of indelible memories.

Yet another way to examine your life is by your own decades. What was your life like when you were in your 20s, your 40s, and so forth? The esteemed writer, James Salter, wrote that “one obvious decade” stands out in your life if you really think about it. I know a woman who just turned 50 and it isn’t sitting well with her. I have good news for her. My 50s were a splendid decade, ten years of personal and professional growth and global travel, marred only by the death of my father.

And coming full circle, examine your life by taking stock of your various jobs as I urged in “The Working Years.” Or how about this? Try a geographical assessment. Evaluate your life based on where you have lived. In that regard, I have had five distinct lives. I grew up in Lincolnton, Georgia, went to UGA in Athens, moved back to Lincolnton to teach a year, returned to Athens to earn a Masters degree, and then moved across the Savannah to Columbia, South Carolina. Each place I lived put its stamp on me.

I suppose you could look at your life through the lens of relationships, too. Close ties with another human changes us for sure. The thing is, myriad paths to metamorphosis exist. Religion, running, marriage, divorce, career changes, and more offer ways to transform your life. But you have to decide you want to change it.

As autumn tints leaves many colors, transformation surrounds us. It’s above us, around us, and beneath our feet. I was running on a trail in a forest recently when I saw what appeared to be an odd leaf. I stopped and picked it up. It was the cocoon you see in the photo running with this column. A silk case spun by a larva. Simple enough. You can see where what transformed into a moth cut or chewed its way free to begin a new life phase. Not so simple but worth the risk. Escape the cocoon that holds you back. Fight your way free, spread your wings, and take flight.

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”