"The past is history, the future is a mystery and the present is a gift." - Valerie Malone, Beverly Hills 90210.

Monday, May 30, 2011

What does personal growth mean to me?

So I am in Lima on a potentially career changing assignment with my company and trying to decide should I stay or should I go.

In many ways the few months I have been here already has been a time to really grow and mature.  It seems odd to talk about "maturing" at my age, I just turned 36, but nonetheless it makes sense.  I lead a fairly self indulgent life in LA, from shopping to sex, so being in a place where I am not sure what the norms of behavior are has made me rethink what I want and how I want to live.

In Lima things are just different in many ways.  Not better, not worse, just different.  For example, I arrived from LA with a bit of a cough that I picked up in the plane.  In LA, I would go to my local Taget, hit the cough syrup aisle and pick from the 842 options.  Here, I had to go the the pharmacy (not like a Walgreens, literally just a stand alone pharmacy), describe to the person working there my symptoms and then she gave me the one product that would help.  It tasted like putrid honey, but the cough was gone in a couple of days.  This experience caused me to think about these differences.  The system here is just different, again not better or worse, but just different.  So why was I bothered by having to interact with someone?  Is it just habit?  If that is the case does that mean I could get used to things here fairly easily?  If what I like to do is just habit, then it would stand to reason that I could drop one habit for another.

Thinking about this has caused me to wonder what I really want as my next act.  I have log believed that things are never the way they are always going to be and that everything gets you ready for what's next.  So what is this experience getting me ready for?  I never expected to move to LA, but it happened and I love it.  I never expected to be in Lima and here I am.  I don't know anything about the mining industry, but I am working on what may be a $1 billion mining project.  So is next more international work?  Is next staying in Lima and making it work here long term?  Is next a flight back to LA and a stop at Micky's in WeHo?  Or is this experience meant to get me outside my comfort zone so I do something all together different?  I have sometimes thought I wasn't the best fit for an engineering consulting company, but it has been over 5 years now and I can't really complain.  I am also not sure what I would do if I were to do something different. 

So, is my hestitation around staying in Lima really about the assignment and the fear of being gay in Lima or is it really about something else, about wanting to do something else?  If it is about something else, how do I decide what that something else is?  There are a million things I would like to try, but none of them seem like things I would want to do for a job.  Dressing windows at Barneys.  Yes, it would be kick-ass to do one, maybe a few, but if that was my full time job I would rapidly get bored.  Same thing with implementing that cool new retail concept I have in my head or getting my English PhD and becoming an academic.  All this prompts me to think if I am in this job just be default and if I were do do something else what would that be?

Sometimes being here has felt like a "call" for me, that something it pulling me to this place at this time.  Exploring what that is has been interesting.  And will be the subject of my next post. 

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