Having your feet set squarely on the ground is underrated. After schooling ends, our toes lift, hover, preparing for the rapid zig zags and about faces that are inherent in the lives of twenty-somethings (and thirty-somethings lets be real). The flexibility is imperative; it takes time to figure out who you are and what you don’t want to do. The percentage of people whose first job is their career is miniscule.
After while, though, the earth looks mighty attractive. To have some security in knowing what’s next and let out the breath of anticipation. Constantly hopping from paid job to freelance to internship to unpaid blogging every week takes a psychic toll. It starts to seem that everyone else is settled into a salaried gig at Google or some New York financial titan.
There are days when steadiness is all I want. Next year, this time, I’ll still be right here.
But then I snap out of it. Ours is the zero-gravity generation, feet off the ground but floating higher than our predecessors could have imagined. Some pundits paint us as lazy or entitled, when we’re really just turning flips in the space station as they look on with envy from behind their white picket fences, infested with termites and crumbling under broken pension systems after all these years.
With the world pried open like a succulent oyster, wriggling slowly in a bath of salt water, what else to do but consume it and savor the slight discomfort that comes with a taste that lasts a lifetime. Fly for 14 hours, Skype your mom like you were down the street. Or jump into the startup game, throwing financial security to the wind for a chance at originality and responsibility so rarely afforded the associates and coordinators of the capitalist structure.
The earth isn’t going anywhere. Don’t force an early anchorage. Join me and the EMPT family as we orbit the solar system, mindful of the future but living in the moment, searching for meaning in every day experience and making sure to breathe it all in.