I wonder why, sometimes, we are taught to view life in chunks. I maintain we were taught this because I am sure my brain didn’t come up with this idea itself. So, why do we see chunks of time for one thing or another?

There is childhood, then the teen years¹Where I think we were supposed to be a little rebellious. The salad days arrive and we learn to be independent and then plan for the future²moving from grasshopper to ant?. A long stretch of career is to follow as we then prepare for retirement — the active retirement and then the long days journey into night³Thank you Eugene O’Neill for that image of riding off into the sunset..

Chunks.

As I sit here contemplating the chunks, I know I didn’t do them just like everyone else. First – I spent way too much time in college. And as independent and as successful as I think I am, I know I couldn’t have done that without Husband’s support. Looking back, you could almost say I was a Zonker⁴Thank you Trudeau, Gary, for that great image of the professional student with a career of Professional Student. That time period, give or take, lasted from 18 to 35. A long chunk interspersed with waitressing and assisting and studying new things. I imagine it now as pinball game where I bounced off one field of study to another trying to find something that fit.

The biggest chunk so far is that time called career. Accidentally, I have spent it on things that fly and how to communicate with them. I wouldn’t have chosen this field to spend the career time⁵I wanted to design semiconductors, but oh well!. It is where I ended up, and it has been good for me and my family. It has been interesting and I have found things to be passionate about. I think lots of people end up in a different place than they were aiming for.

Chunks need to be a certain size to matter. A small chunk, the one year in graduate school for Classics, doesn’t make much of a dent in the timeline. It just gets swallowed with the whole professional student chunk.

I have decided to go ahead and pay off my student loans in the next 18 months or so. That brings a milestone⁶I have written about those before and it makes me think of how the chunks relate to each other. It also makes me think about how long I want this current chunk⁷Now almost 18 years and counting to last. Should it be 20 years? 25 years? Does it last until on-boarding to the chunk called retirement that is supposed to be golden and glorious and hides that second half of retirement which will be, even in the best of circumstances, watching your body slowly⁸or quickly give up. 

This weekend, the news reported that former US President Jimmy Carter has entered hospice care. This makes me sad. Not because I think it is wrong to enter hospice. I saw both of my parents enter hospice at the end of their lives, and I have to say the quality of care has progressed and I am grateful our culture has moved to where dying with dignity and a relief of pain is an option. It is a brave option.

I don’t know that President Carter really entered retirement. I mean, maybe he did. I don’t know him personally. He kept working for peace and health for everyone in the world. He kept working for dignity and fairness. He kept teaching Sunday School⁹I mean, I wouldn’t have done well in his Sunday School class, heretic that I am, but it is amazing he did it as part of his routine. Perhaps that job is the one that defined his chunks for him? We all define our chunks our own way.. 

What I have realized about life and the world around me is that sitting within my current chunk, I don’t want to move up. I don’t want to move back. I don’t want to move sideways. I am not ready to call the chunk complete, but I know I don’t want to stay here forever. I want another chunk. Something completely different and challenging and not what I expected my life to have. Just like all the other chunks. And I am damned if I know how to move on to that chunk.

When we made it to 29 years of marriage last month¹⁰Another huge chunk. My systems engineer-ee mind wants the chunks to be independent from each other, but they are not., I started thinking about what I wanted to be thinking about in 10 years. First, I hope I am around to be thinking and writing these letters. But, in truth, I didn’t have much to say I wanted to be thinking about. I think that is why I am not finished with this chunk and not ready to name, define, or embrace the next one.

I guess I also have to admit chunks are not entirely linear if you look at them up close. Sometimes, you have to step back to see the chunks of life and what you did with your time over the course of days, months, years, or decades. There is a huge chunk of my life where I died my hair. Then, one day, I didn’t do it anymore. And I didn’t realize it was a new chunk until years had passed and I realized there was the chunk of time dying my hair mattered to me, and then there is the chunk of time I am in where it did’t anymore.

When you get to the end, I don’t think you actually get to see your own chunks. Other people may see them and comment on them. But, it will be too late for you to be part of the conversation. So just like inflection points, having some awareness of your chunks now may help you to make small decisions, take small actions, have small changes that make the chunks that mean something you mean something for the people you leave behind. Or not. Maybe the chunks aren’t really a thing, and we are all just living in a spectrum we can’t see. But that is another letter.