A Lesson in Six Years

Learning to seek the right things

I’ve been writing this post for about a month. October 18th was the sixth anniversary of the last day of my first business.

How’s that for some numerology?

I was so damn proud of that thing, even though I thought it might kill me at the time. The work load would have made a clydesdale sigh, the workforce was made up of ex and future cons, and the client base was among the most entitled in the country.

All I really did to grow it was apply some of my dad’s business wisdom: “Don’t quit.”

For ten years, that thing kept growing until it passed $1.5 million in annual revenue. With that credential, I felt like I could join the company, so to speak, of business-owning men in my family—the tradesmen, the contractors, the business-builders… It was never just about making money. It was about satisfying that primal need to provide for my family. To stand tall in my place in the family legacy. To be a Provider. To be a man.

I could look my father in the eyes.

It’s been six years since that thing crashed and burned, and I’m sick to death of talking about it; of defining myself by it. It’s my high school game-winning touchdown, but I’m almost 51 now.

What have I been doing since then? Not much I can brag about on my LinkedIn profile. Not even if I slap some lipstick and pull a skirt on it.

• I was a LEGO marketing guy—not for the LEGO group, though. It was for some kids in Manassas, VA, who had definitively cracked the Facebook Ads marketing code. I was basically their glorified intern.

• I did some video editing for a writing company.

• I did some leatherwork for myself. That started to go places, but then…well, let’s just say I got some resistance from an unexpected source.

• And then there’s the current enterprise. It’s a soul-sucking call center job that combines all the things a “self-made” guy hates the most: no autonomy, monitoring, ridiculous metrics, hourly pay, scheduled breaks, bitchy clients I can’t respond…naturally…to, etc.

Look, I know how that sounds. I can feel the memes incoming. “Remember, your hell is somebody else’s dream…”

Uh huh. That’s the thing, though: entrepreneurship ruins you for W2 jobs. I don’t knock people who have them, but if you’ve ever created money from your own effort, will, and perseverance, where you control the life-force of the whole operation, it’s tough to go back.

And anyway, nobody hires people who have been “out of the workforce” for more than ten years. Especially when you can—you have—done their jobs. And everyone else’s from janitorial to the C-suite.

Nothing I’ve done since has come close to replacing the income of that first company, which makes it hard to just…“move on.” Every day that goes by without meeting or exceeding that first, glorious milestone is another day day you get a big, red FAILURE stamped on your forehead. And when you damn near lose your entire family over it, too, well, the pressure is on.

I remember that awesome phrase from Red Dawn: “Marines never die—they just go to Hell and regroup.”

I spent four years in entrepreneurial Hell before I moved the family to Oklahoma, and I figured our move would be the start of our “regrouping.” Not quite. God took my family away and stuck me in a monastery.

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The alarm goes off at 6:00 AM. If I slack off, I’ll hear someone hitting a stick against the wooden semantron at 6:30, 6:45, and then 7:00. This is the ancient alarm clock used in monasteries to rouse the sleepy monks for morning prayers. A stick and a board. Our semantron looks like a WWI-era propeller.

Divine Liturgy starts at 7:00. That can go anywhere from an hour to two, three, or even longer, depending on the feasts or holidays. You never know and you don’t ask. Incense wafts from the little chapel down the hall if they celebrate there, but somehow tendrils of the stuff find their way around three corners and three long corridors to the residential wing if they’re in the church. If Fr. Basil, who I once said (to his face), “You’re the kindest hardass I’ve ever met,” had been incensing the halls at night and blessing us visitors, long-time or otherwise, then the moment I open my cell door I’ll get hit with an undeniable reminder of where I am.

I learned early on that I couldn’t both attend liturgies AND rebuild my career. So I head to the coffee maker and my prayer rope in my office.

I make a single, deep cup, usually black because I can’t afford such luxuries as cream. And anyway, I’m sure the monks can cite a source saying that cream comes from the Evil One.

I start my morning prayer walk. Teratouli (Greek for “Little Monster,”) the mid-sized dog of indeterminate breed (hound?), waits for me just outside my office door. The second I’m outside, he bolts, quivering with excitement, tail helicoperting in a blur. For him, it’s “paw patrol” time. He accompanies me on my prayer walk, his nose in every ditch, every armadillo hole, and every thorny bush. Then he runs back to me, permits a quick pat on his hind quarter, and then he’s off again. Today, no doubt, is the day he’s going to get a squirrel. He can feel it.

Me? I walk and work the knots on my prayer rope, alternating between sips of coffee and sign of the Cross. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…” I walk around the inner perimeter of the monastery grounds, keeping an eye out for deer at the distant tree line, and raccoons at the chicken coop. Armadillos are so numerous they’re boring.

Then it’s work time. By now I already feel the pressure and desperation. Time is short.

I do my things. In the past, I tried to cram in leatherwork, website building, social media marketing, and, diligently for awhile there, writing. Eventually the words stopped coming, though. I didn’t know what to say. I’d said all I could say about the business and The Situation. Besides—everybody’s ennui tank is small.

Eventually I run out of time. The first trapeza bell rings. The “mid-day” meal starts at 10:00. It’s usually “formal,” which doesn’t mean tuxes. It means that we sit quietly and eat while someone (me, more often than not) reads some spiritual text or another. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we fast. That means no meat and usually no dairy.

Oh, and we fast during Lent.

And during Advent.

Oh, and there’s the Apostle’s fast…

The best thing about the monastery has been the post-trapeza conversations. Usually we’ll gather around the informal trapeza dining table. It’s usually a monk or two, a novice or two, some visitors, and some guy who can’t believe how spectacularly different life is going than where he thought it would go six years ago. We unravel the mysteries of God, and then we do the dishes.

Then it’s off to the call center job.

Rinse and repeat. It’s been a year-and-a-half now.

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I don’t know if there’s anything metaphysical about “six” years as a recovery time from business loss and subsequent existential crisis. The first boss I had after my company crashed (and first boss in ten years) told me about his recovery time after he’d lost his business. “It took me six years,” he said on my first day. He was sitting back in his chair on the other side of a broad executive desk. “I almost lost everything.”

He told me this moments after telling me what he was going to do with the remnants of my company. “I’m going to suck every last dollar out of it and bleed it dry. You can have it back then if you want.”

I promised myself that day that it wouldn’t take me six years. I’d built that company from nothing, knowing nothing, except how to not quit. And now I knew digital marketing, website design, and a whole bunch of other things. I’d be back in business in a year, tops.

Six years later…I live in a monastery in Oklahoma.

I did not see that coming.

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This is where I usually wrap up the sentimental journey on a positive note. Perhaps a witty aphorism. A firm grip on an irrational belief that “everything will be alright.”

Sorry. Not really feeling it this time. I did intend to use this quote from Abba Dorotheus, though:

“Firmly believe that everything, down to the smallest detail, happens by divine providence. Then nothing you encounter will perturb you.”

You know what? I actually do believe that, although I’m literally not feeling it at the moment.

Another quote:

“When God put a calling on your life, He already factored in your stupidity. Most comforting thing I’ve ever read.”

You want to know my current theory? Here it is:

Yes, God is aware of every trial, either because he sends it, or because he allows it. It is all for our sanctification. This is an often-discussed topic around the trapeza table. Sometimes he allows us to suffer in orde r for us to learn from our idiotic behavior, but also because he wants us to learn how to seek and depend on him.

I hate it. I absolutely despise it. It feels like domestic abuse.

Nonetheless, He’s the author of existence, so, His rules. You know what happens to people who resist it to the point of insane obstinance. Choices tend to become “eternal.”

But, I think he does more than allow it because it teaches us reliance on him. I think, for some people like, for example, yours truly, he allows suffering to squeeze us out of our comfort zones in order to choose, and, I theorize, to learn to fight.

We tend to treat God like a celestial vending machine. We seek his “blessings,” preferably, at least for the time being, in American currency.

But he doesn’t want us to just acknowledge his existence, or comply with his rules. He wants us to desire him. To move our will, our souls, our being toward him, to be consumed by and to be with him. Forever. Why? Because he apparently loves us.

We don’t get it. I certainly don’t. But I think that’s what this is all about. There are so many distractions. Always has been—even before smart phone addictions, if you can remember a time before those.

We suffer loss because we desire the wrong things. That I’m starting to get.

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