Novelties

I prepared the deep thoughts that follow first, but then realized a more concrete update might be worthwhile.

Work has begun and is excellent so far. As with every Towers office (or Willis Towers Watson, whenever that sinks in), LA is filled with bright, clever, kind people whose gears are always turning. Yesterday began with my welcome breakfast, an event shared with another new hire and consisting of the two of us sitting in a conference room with a breakfast spread while the whole floor came through to get food. While the receiving line format felt a little odd, it provoked a lot of fun conversations, including an almost unanimous encouragement to take the LA Metro in to work. Given that vote of confidence and after my cube neighbor toured me down past the station by work, I tried it today and found it to be a pretty good means of getting in, certainly for a former DCer.

I also sent an introductory e-mail around full of my sense of humor and my interests, trying to improve once again on the long process it has been to bring my self, all of my self, to work. My desk sports a little Funko Tyrion and a bobblehead Darth Vader, while my coffee mug options are Doctor Who and Hamilton, both amazing gifts. It's good to be back in the swing of things and I took no small joy in choosing my benefits today, so that I can get a little knee work done and adventure out into the wilderness again.

On to the deep thoughts! At the office today, I found myself thinking about the relativity of time. Ever since I reached back out to Towers, I have remarked to friends how strange it seems that so momentous a time for me will seem like a much shorter time to my former company, especially when it comes to my service history. The retirement work cycle is, like so many jobs, annual, so missing six months doesn't feel like that much...except to my Atlanta office friends who have accused me of planning my six-months of self-discovery to conveniently miss a big special project AND disclosure hell month. Oops? The six months felt so very long to me, in the best of all possible ways. It feels like years since I left Georgia in August.

Then, today, I realized that I have only been here five days. This seemed impossible. How could I have been in Maryland a week and a day ago? That's not right, is it?

Which brings me to my two cents as far as the relativity of time...the key, at least for me, seems to be novelty. Doing new things slows time...or perhaps more accurately records memories on slower film. My six months off feel so long because such a high percentage of that time brought new experiences, new friends, new places, new growth. When I consider instead how the periods of sameness I have felt in the past...and how quick they seemed at the time and still seem. Whole years or handfuls of years I could describe in a sentence. Years spent living for the weekends, so that the weeks themselves were edited out of my life story each time I returned to it.

It's just a thesis (and I can almost guarantee it's more friendly to extroverts), but in this absurdly short time since my westward rocket landed in LA, nearly every moment of every day has been new and surprising, dynamic and challenging. Those moments have stretched, extended by the novelty of it all. It gives me confidence; if all I have to do to put down a life of great length is to keep aching for newness, then I have come to the right place.