365 #25 - Disengagement

Sunday, January 29

The last 4 months of my life have been antiprototypical.  Atypical?  I am fundamentally an engager.  When I do something, I am all in.  I find it very hard to be on the fringe of things.  Since October 14, however, my entire professional self was engaged in disengagement.  I had to be very involved and conscious of not being involved; handing off responsibilities, data, contacts, and any knowledge I had to people who would need it in the future. Because I would not.

My transition away from Nikon entailed lots of meetings, lots of reading emails, and replying just to 1 person, informing them of how I recommended to deal with that issue.  Replying to distribution lists would have poisoned my efforts to disengage.  Thankfully, by December 15, my disengagement from that employer was complete.

Since we accepted the offer to move to NY, I have been working really hard to disengage from all of my other commitments and activities. I took leave of Cub Scouts (I've been a den leader for a couple years), from teaching music to the church kids, from teaching art literacy to our elementary school kids' classes, and last night, from my a capella quartet.  Cub Scouts was fun and interesting - but honestly not my favorite extracurricular.

The art and childrens choir were awesome.  But the hardest thing to leave is the quartet.  The group's roots are simple: I wanted to sing with a men's choir.  I did not want to drive anywhere or sing anything I didn't like.  So I invited all the men I knew at church who could sing.  And enough showed up that we had a viable group.  The membership has rotated a bit, but 3 of us have been the same. We have been through job hunting together, health problems, a baby birth, several performance opportunities, one member (and now 2) moving away.  But we have sung at my home almost every week since October 2008.  I love those guys.  I always will.  And from the mood at rehearsal last night, it looks like they're going to find a replacement for me and keep singing.  Life rolls on - we learn, we grow, we plant, and hopefully as we leave, the seeds we have planted have blessed someone else.