With the changing of the seasons, (which is a real thing here in New England), you learn to transition your wardrobe accordingly, which we actually did today. And since our favorite season is autumn, we even look forward to the falling leaves since we are not the ones raking them anymore. What is more, we are stocked with the flavors of the season, including pumpkin coffee, muffins, candles, you name it.
So why am I waxing poetic about seasons? Well, one of the really life-changing truths I’ve learned is that life is literally a series of times and seasons. The Bible even says so in Ecclesiastes 3:1,6: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven…a time to search and a time to give up (emphasis mine).” Ah, there is the rub. There are times for quitting some things in life, including jobs, homes, relationships, and other stuff.
Bob Goff, author of Dream Big, quits something every Thursday, just because. Jon Acuff, author of Quitter, had eight jobs in an eight-year period, quitting six of the eight during that time. And Seth Godin, author of The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), suggests that Vince Lombardi’s trope that “Winners never quit and quitters never win” is bad advice, stating, “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”
Not only is there an art to quitting, but there comes a time for some of us to quit stuff in order to create art in our lives. And so that is what I did about this time last year. Regular readers may recall that during the pandemic I got hired at my wife’s company as a “technical writer.” The reason I place that in quotes is that the job actually entailed tweaking thirty-year-old corporate documents, which technically speaking, is not writing, if you get my drift.
So after six months of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as I shared with my manager, I chose to jump ship and return to running my own writing and photography business. Reading an ad titled “One Spin” helped me make the transition: “Before you know it, you’re so numb from the comfort of routine that you didn’t feel a thing as that great adventure called life slipped away like sand between your fingers…and never forget, you only get one spin.”
And since I was on a roll with this quitting thing I resolved at year’s end to issue an ultimatum to a loved one that radical change was necessary in our relationship and the other party has chosen to resist said change so we are presently incompatible. For any relationship to be healthy it must be reciprocal and if it is not then boundaries are necessary to facilitate a transition toward a healthier one.
As The Minimalists (Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus) write in Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works, “Letting go of someone does not mean that you don’t love that person; it means only that their behavior won’t allow you to participate in the relationship anymore. It doesn’t make you bad or evil or negligent to walk away. You’re making room for a better life.” Boundaries are like that.