It has been one of life's great pleasures blogging for you, dear reader, over the past five plus years. It feels like we've grown up together.
When I started out, I was a zealous convert waxing poetic about the virtues of managing your own portfolio and enthusiastically sharing financial literacy lessons I'd never learned in residency.
I wanted so deeply for you to do better than I'd done:
- Carve out protected space for passions and people you cared about that were safe from the encroachment of your obligations to medicine.
- Practice clinically because you wanted to, not because you had no better alternative.
- Achieve financial independence early, so you could make career choices from a position of strength.
- Identify those aspects of work that were most satisfying and reorient your career to do more of those activities.
There was a lot of talk about reordering priorities and protecting time from the erosive intrusions of a medical career.
We've come a long way. My kids are far from strangers.
My son plays alongside me with a group of 40-50 year old dads in our weekly virtual strategy game night.
My daughter and I spent countless hours over the past year and change on social studies and science lessons - while to my relief the only dating she's done is carbon dating exercises with me, I anticipate that this, too, will change.
As I look over more recent posts, my focus has shifted. I started out struggling how to make more time for my family. I proceeded to change the institutions I belonged to (my physician group) gradually from within, using policy corrections that enabled my colleagues and I to enjoy greater flexibility in our careers.
I am undoubtedly more fit today than I was when I started this blog.
I sleep more soundly (without the need for a benadryl nightcap).
My wife and I have the opportunity to connect daily, and we continue to grow together. We make a formidable team.
My kids are older and more independent. They need me in different ways, at different times, on different days and for different durations than they used to.
During the week, their afternoons are spent on homework, sports, extracurriculars and with friends. Weekends are now the best opportunity for us to connect. This is natural and age-appropriate, but it has left me with more time on my hands during the week.
With the kids having developed competence and momentum, more head space was available for me to think through what I'd hoped my second act might look like.
I turned my plank into a runway, which held my career in clinical medicine aloft in a slow glide until it ran completely out of fuel.
Serendipity and persistence led to an unexpected job offer for an administrative position at the precise moment when I was ready to leave clinical medicine.
My new position will help to fill that weekday time formerly occupied by the kids, hopefully in a manner that provides sufficient flexibility to remain present when they need me - as tutor, chauffeur and gofer.
With the pandemic having once more proven life fragile and fleeting, I am savoring this moment.
We've accompanied one another as we reclaimed our time, found our mojo, and raised our overall financial literacy.
The fact that this blog spends very little time these days discussing the basics of finance is a testament to how the latter topic, when tended to regularly, eventually takes care of itself.
My latest career choice is guided by intellectual curiosity more than economic necessity - an exciting milestone to have reached.
As I embark on this second act, kids unfurling their wings, brainstorming with my wife what our empty nest years might promise, it seems the perfect time to take a year-long break from blogging.
I look forward to this sabbatical to recharge, explore new interests, and course-correct as I go.
If there are particular highs or lows that I suspect you might find beneficial to your own journey, I might drop a post about it, but for the most part I intend to redirect the energy I've invested in the blog.
This will constitute my final post for 2021.
I cannot thank you enough for the kind words, vulnerable moments and genuine warmth you have offered me over the years.
Fondly,
CD