Time To Saddle Up

Like many of you, my professional life has been in limbo since roughly the 20th of December. Sure, I’ve been into the office on several occasions since that last Friday before Christmas, but not an awful lot of serious work has gotten done since the beginning of the Holiday Season. That all ends this morning. I will trudge in early, put on a pot of coffee and gird my loins for my 38th year in my chosen profession.

2020 will be like most of the previous ten years or so. From January through the end of May I will cram my schedule full of appointments with clients, one annual review after another. I will meet with them, go over their accounts, access their results, update their risk tolerances and suggest any changes that might be appropriate. When I walk out to the reception area to greet them I will immediately notice when one of them is ill. It happens almost every year, at least once. In the 12 months since I have seen him or her, they’ve gotten sick. I can see it in their eyes. It always stops me short. It is a disturbing thing to be confronted by the relentless pursuit of mortality.

By May 31st I will have grown extremely tired of the sound of my own voice. At least once during this five months of frenzied activity I will loose my voice entirely. It will occur to me more than once that I probably should space these reviews out over the entire year instead of front-loading them into the first five months. But, I will remind myself that there is a method to this madness. By doing 70% of my year’s work in the first five months of the year, I free myself up for a summer and early fall full of...Maine. This year there will be two trips, the entire month of July and two, hopefully three weeks in late September, early October. Once I have scratched my Maine itch, I will return for two more intense months of client meetings, then things will slow down again over the holidays. I have used this strategy for several years now and am happy with it, my attempt to achieve the much ballyhooed life-work balance that all the smart kids are talking about. The plus side is that I get to recharge the batteries and step away from the incessant pressure of this business for an extended period of time every year. The down side is...I walk away from a lot of money. As a business owner, I am afforded no “vacation pay.” Time spent away means that productive activities are placed on hold. No work? No new business gets done. Luckily, I have a cracker-jack assistant who keeps the place from catching on fire while I’m away. 

Is the money I lose worth the time I’m away? It’s a fair question for which I have an unequivocal answer...Yes...a thousand times YES.

I do not live to work. The end goal of my life is not the accumulation of wealth or the illusion of safety. I have learned through hard lessons that all of this could be over tomorrow. I am one car wreck, one shadowy x-ray away from losing everything...and so are you. I don’t dwell on this hard truth. If I did I would be miserable. But I do keep the tenuous nature of this life in mind when I make my plans. Ultimately, I work to live and find ways to serve. I battle to keep my eyes and energies focused on the eternal, not the temporal. That’s not always easy, but each year I get better at it.

So, this morning it’s time to saddle up. July will be here before I know it!