By serendipity, I had a batch of shifts early in the month that resulted in a solid week off. I awoke on the first morning of that free week with an almost giddy sense of anticipation. It felt like the first day of summer in elementary school.
That joy, alas, was not sustained. I found that I did not immediately jump on the various home projects I've had on my to do list. I did not seek to learn or improve a skill. I was largely complacent. The week left me in a funk.
I had become a lotus eater.
In Greek mythology, when Odysseus and his men were circumnavigating the Peloponnese on their way home from Troy, Zeus created a storm that forced their ships to take refuge in the land of the lotus eaters. There, they consumed an intoxicating fruit that robbed them of any ambition, rendering them forgetful and sloth.
Living in southern California between rolling green foothills and a picturesque shore, it's no stretch to imagine how easily one might surrender to life as a lotus eater.
This is what keeps me up at night (first world problem though it may be): What happens when you remove the scaffolding of work as an organizing principle over which your life is draped?
Do you rise to the occasion and design a radical and defiant structure based on highly personal principles and values? Or do you instead get an amorphous blob of cloth that immediately drops to the ground due to the absence of an exoskeleton.
After years of pursuing financial independence, leaving medicine behind might come to fruition sooner than expected. Every day that I haven't figured out the new structure threatens me with the prospect of the blob.