Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my career, as an Emergency Manager, and the careers of others. I've been thinking a lot about how our jobs fit into the broader context of our lives and the meaning of the roles we assume in our jobs. To frame these introspections, let me first say that I don't believe we randomly just arrive on this planet, and just survive for as long as we can. I believe that we come on this earth with a purpose, a mission, a plan for our live - a plan that focuses on enriched life experience, growth, and evolution. Enriched life experience to me really means we travel, we explore, we try new things, we meet and enjoy people, we educate ourselves, we enjoy the lives of family and friends and cultures of our planet. Growth and evolution refers to the meaning of it all, the life lessons we gain, the accomplishments we achieve, the ways we apply knowledge and life experience to achieve goals.
In the philosophical framework of a life focused on enriched life experience, growth, and evolution, I wonder the role jobs / careers play in this process. I watch people, carefully: how they go about their jobs, how they behave, how they interact with others in their line of work. I'm trying to assess if they are just there to collect a paycheck, or there because it is a passion and a life's work, and it just so happens that their passion generates dollars. It's not always obvious. People can be extremely effective at their jobs, and be doing it for the sole purpose of generating dollars. People can be completely awful at their jobs, but they find a sense of purpose in it. Why are people janitors, why are people presidents?
I find myself in the very fortunate circumstance of having a job / career of my choosing. How many generations has it been that people generally had that choice? Luckily for me, I live in a time, and was raised by a family and a society where I was permitted to decide how I wanted to work and generate dollars. My parents not only gave me opportunity to choose, but encouraged me to choose, and didn't AT ALL influence that process. They gave me an amazing gift: the ability to explore and choose - one that caused my mother to gain many gray hairs.
My path ....
When I was a young boy, sometime in elementary school, I decided I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I can't exactly recall the reason why, but I remember wanting it and being very clear in that choice. One time in third grade, the teacher asked us to take turns standing in the front of the room before our classmates and proclaim our career desires. I said with enthusiasm that I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I suppose it had something to do with using a computer for the first time: a Commodore 64. It had a blue screen, and you could instruct it to change the color of the font when typing and I thought that was the damn coolest thing I had seen. I had computer lab in 4th and 5th grade where we used a program called Turtle Logo, and it was basically a triangle, but we had the ability to program its' movements on the screen, and that included direction, duration moving in that direction, colors drawn on the screen while moving, and the ability to loop commands so that ultimately, you could create designs on the screen that looked like elaborate geometric designs - it was damn awesome. And I think it solidified my intent to interact with technology as a career choice.
In junior college, my career trajectory changed.
While working my way through my undergraduate curriculum, cracks in the walls of my plans began to emerge. My sister had met and fell in love with an electrical engineer (EE), my now brother-in-law (who I cherish). He went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, a prestigious school in California for engineering, and I idolized him. So I set my focus on that school as where I would obtain my EE degree. But as I continued through my undergraduate calculus and physics courses, a combination of factors altered the course of my life. My brother-in-law, my EE idol, didn't have faith in my ability to be a successful EE. My physics teacher, a brilliant man, didn't have faith in my ability to be a successful EE. And that tapped into my self confidence issues about my abilities.
The ax in the coffin.
My wonderful brother-in-law set me up to have a job in the industry, working for a company he worked at while I was at junior college - a company that build gas analyzers. I was very proud of that job, it was like an internship in my field while in college and I remain grateful that he lined me up for this position. I worked as sort of an entry level technician, building gas analyzers, working on their computers, and other duties as assigned. But I was working alongside REAL engineers, my brother-in-law, and the owner of the company, and they are extreeeeeeemly competent and accomplished engineers, while I was just a technician. I felt that I would never rise to their level of expertise. And I felt something else: I felt like something was missing. I wondered how happy I would be spending a life in a warehouse building electronics. I felt something was missing.
This realization that I may never be an excellent engineer coupled with a belief that that career choice left some of my life skills unutilized, greatly saddened me, deeply. I had, after all, focused my life on this idea that I would indeed be a successful electrical engineer. I wanted to be an engineer who worked in the audio field. I loved music and audio equipment. When I was in high school, I liked installing stereos in cars, and indeed had a custom stereo in my car. I studied speaker enclosure design and downloaded software that modeled the audible response of subwoofers given design characteristics and speaker characteristics. I built many custom subwoofer enclosures and to this day, I have a custom stereo in my truck and a 12-inch sub that is housed in a custom enclosure that I built. I wanted to design high fidelity amplifiers that used tube amplifiers, "tube amps." I was told once that tube amps created a warmer more authentic sound and I was enamored by the idea of revitalizing a technology of a bygone era that created warm rich sound. I even had a name for the company I would found: Iridescence.
But alas, my dreams of becoming a successful engineer leading a company that provided audiophile quality home audio equipment, and a life pursuing a dream crafting with my hands products that bring the joy of music to people, was dashed by the depleted belief that I could be "good" at this. And so the day before I was to sign a lease for an apartment in Morrow Bay, after having been accepted to my dream EE school Cal Poly, my lifelong dreams were in a matter of hours, gone.
I spent some time thinking about what I would do now that my EE dreams were gone. Up to this point, there was no other focus of my life's work, and now, with that dream abandoned, I had to begin the arduous process of refocusing my energy to something else, a process I had never envisioned would occur. I thought to myself, what career can I do, and love, and be successful? What do I love? It came down to geology (I wanted to be a Vulcanologist) or meteorology. I decided that I would never make much money as a guy who studied rocks, so I chose meteorology. But since I had never considered this as a career option, I literally didn't know how to proceed. EE was simple: go to Cal Poly, get degree, start company, never look back. Meteorology, ummmmm.....
So I did what any lost soul should do in a crisis: I sought the advice of a wise man - a time honored tradition. I was at that time taking a geography course by a professor Ted Wieden. I had a profound level of respect for this man, and he, apparently, did for me as well - after all, he got me a job with a friend / county employee working on eradicating noxious weeks (yellow star thistle, you bastard). So, I asked if I could ask his advice during his office hour. When I met with him, I told him this extreme dilemma I was in, the precarious place I had found myself in - during that time, I never felt more lost in my life, it was like falling in a pit of darkness and not knowing when I would hit the bottom. I told Ted that I wanted to study meteorology but that I didn't know how to proceed from here. He asked me what I wanted to study, and I had not put much thought into it actually. To that point, I just knew the atmosphere fascinated me and every time as I child I observed a thunderstorm, I wondered deeply how it all worked, which was the reason I chose meteorology. So I sat for a second and thought about it and I said, I wanted to study severe weather. What happened next changed the course of my life, something Ted to this day does not know.
After I told Ted that I wanted to study severe weather, without hesitation or thought, Ted looked me squarely in the eye, he leaned forward at his desk and said with such confidence: "You are going to the University of Oklahoma." He didn't say, you should consider the University of Oklahoma, and maybe this or that school, he told me I was going there. What balls!! Can you imagine a better adviser for a life decision that would change the entire course of your life???
Up to that point, I had encountered people who only doubted my choice to be an engineer, and sowed seeds of doubt. Now here was a man that now only had confidence in my abilities, unwavering and unclouded confidence, but also a plotted and decisive course forward for me in my life. How could I doubt this message?
So he decided my fate, and changed the course of my life: Thank You Ted Wieden. From that day forward, I focused my life's journey on Oklahoma. Which was fucking crazy because not in a million billion years had I ever considered going to Oklahoma. But I applied for what I later learned to be one of the most prestigious programs for meteorology in the country, and the leading program in the world for severe weather research, and I was accepted. And off I went to Oklahoma.
The thing is, even though I knew I wanted to study meteorology, and I had been accepted and was attending OU (Go Sooners!!) to study meteorology, I didn't know what I was going to do with this degree, once I obtained it. After all, I spent my life focusing on engineering. Now, I was surrounded by people who focused on meteorology since they were children, now I was at a disadvantage. Again, it was scary: How do I support myself and make a living with this knowledge? I didn't want to be on TV, and I was fairly certain I didn't want to be a forecaster, but what? Enter May 8, 2003.
May 8, 2003. I was studying for my upcoming dynamics final - to this day the hardest class I have ever taken. It was my second semester at OU (which means I knew nothing of storm structure) and all of my classmates were storm chasing in Kansas. I stayed home to study because grades were more important. While I was studying, it happened, my NOAA Weather Radio began to alarm. "Tornado Warning." Which means, a tornado was coming. I decided to break away from my studies to go see what was happening. After all, I had never seen a tornado and always wanted to. So, I drove north on I-35 and put myself in a location of the storm I would later learn is called The Bears Cage. I saw what I believed to be a lowering in the storm to my north and I was both excited and scared - I thought that lowering was the beginning of a tornado. I was scared too, after all, I was in the heavily populated city of Moore, OK. The lowering dissipated and I believed nothing would happen. I then looked west. I saw something in this storm I would never see again, a rising motion into the storm like nothing I had ever seen, or would see again.
My life was about to change, forever.
About a quarter mile to my west, just across I-35, a motel exploded. Absolutely blew into a million pieces before my eyes. I had one of those time-slows-down moments while I tried to process what I had just seen. And before I could figure it out, nature gave me the answer. Tornado. Here is something that is not commonly known: the part of the tornado you see, it's called the condensation funnel, and sometimes it forms after the tornado touches down. What happened? An F-4 tornado touched down and hit the motel and absolutely, in the matter of a second, destroyed the hotel. Then it appeared: a stovepipe, black, F-4 tornado, and it was headed right for me - how about that for a first tornado experience? I was at an abandoned gas station, I thought the overhang over place where once fuel pumps were placed offered my piece of shit Mazda protection against large hail, should it fall. I had my camera around my neck, ready to capture the images of the first tornado I would ever see. Except, it didn't happen that way. The moment I saw that tornado, and realized it was a 1/4 mile from me and headed at me at 35 mph, I didn't take pictures, I didn't pass go, I didn't collect $200. I ran for my car - for my life, drove across an intersection with a red light where the cars were waiting patiently for the light to change, and drove like a crazy person at a right angle to the direction of movement of the tornado, to get out of its path. I heard nothing, no freight train, no deep rumble, nothing. I looked through my sunroof, and above me was a swirling array of debris from the tornado, I was that close.
After some crafty driving, and when I say crafty, I mean reckless driving to save my life crazy driving, I was behind the tornado and no longer in danger. My heart was beating, I was alive.
It was then that my eyes opened and I saw what had happened. I proceeded to drive through a neighborhood that the tornado had ravaged. I was there even before police and fire. Just a dumb kid from California driving his piece of shit Mazda who wanted to see his first tornado. It wasn't a majestic display of nature roaring through a farmers field in the middle of nowhere. It was a force of nature that destroyed (and luckily on this day, didn't kill). I saw homes on fire, people running to and fro responding to their emergencies, people sitting on curbs crying, people standing and observing the horror, and unable to comprehend what had just happened. That's when it happened, that's when I found my calling.
It was at that moment that I realized I wanted to be an emergency manager. I wanted to be a part of a system that helped people get their lives back after disaster. I knew then that I wanted to spend my life helping people, helping society prepare, helping people recover, when nature's inevitable wrath struck.
That was 11 years ago. After that day, I found a way to be involved with FEMA as a reservist (another story for another day). I am still a reservist with FEMA. I found a career position with Georgia as their Hurricane Program Manager. And I spent 7 years working toward making the state of Georgia a state that was ready for a major hurricane. I now find myself as an emergency manager for a county in Oregon preparing citizens for disasters: winter storms, earthquakes, terrorism, pandemic influenza. And I'm beginning to wonder why. Have I been successful in my desire to assist people in preparing for and surviving earth's fury? That day in Oklahoma, that day that then shaped the future of my life, in the way that Ted Wieden did when I wondered where to go with a heart's desire to be a meteorologist, have I succeeded in my mission? I wonder.
But my journey in this life, one that has been focused on contributing my strengths, my capabilities, my efforts: has my focus on my career been one that was solely focused on generating dollars or one that has been focused on my life's work, and that life's work has resulted in the generation of dollars. I wonder.
How many of us are allowed to focus our work and careers in a way that does more than generate dollars? How many of us are lucky enough to do something that we are passionate about, AND, it generates dollars? And, most importantly, have I been successful? Because I have two goals: I want to be financially capable of supporting myself, and hopefully, someday a family, even wealthy; and also, I want to make a contribution to society. I've learned through this whole life journey of discovery, that I want to leave the world a better place than it would have been had I never been born. I want the world to benefit because of my accomplishments. I want to do something, that is a benefit. And I've learned that the pursuit of dollars and the pursuit of career fulfillment, can be mutually exclusive.
But it also causes me to observe people and ask myself where they are in their journeys. How do their jobs fit in with their life's goal of life enrichment, growth, and evolution? Is their job a means to accomplishing these goals? Or is their job solely a means for generating dollars for life survival? I wonder.
Life is an interesting journey. There are those who seek careers solely for the purpose of generating dollars. And there are those who achieve life goals in their jobs and it just so happens that their job generates dollars. Passion. No passion. And I've had this realization that people assume their jobs like people wearing uniforms. Their uniforms identify them as representation of their life's purpose, or it's just a suit they put on in the morning so they can continue the pursuit of dollars. Where is my job as an emergency manager on that spectrum. I wonder.
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