‘Rumspringa!’ my colleague Tyler wrote to me, during last days at work when hearing of my departure. What a curious word, I thought, with the excited exclamation he’d added…
I had to look it up.
Etymology is a phonetically beautiful German word ‘Rumschpringe’, with origins in the Upper Rhine Valley (Wikipedia). Meaning is ‘jumping or hopping around‘.
I was quietly miffed…feeling more deliberate than jumping or hopping around aimlessly. But only for a split second. As I read more, I loved the spirit of the concept let alone this beautiful word. Rumspringa! I’ll take that. But in my own words, it’s been coming out in conversations more as a mid-life ‘philosophical exercise’. To pause, to catch up and to slow down. A mid-life ‘philosophical exercise’, I’ve started calling it. With a smile 🙂
The evolution to ‘Rumspringa’ is Pennsylvanian German, and came at the gentle hands of the early Amish, to describe the adolescent rite of passage that allows experimentation with ‘worldly’ activities on the weekends, before re-settling on the path ahead.
The Amish concept of Rumspringa is a rite of passage for the youth to go do what they like, on weekends, to break out of the strictures of their faith and its avoidance of modern, technologically-driven ways. To gain full knowledge of ‘freedom’ and the chance to walk away to more usual paths and lifestyles that the world has to offer.
To ‘shit or get off the pot’, per the old Donegal expression, with etymology pre-porcelain rural Ireland era – and sustained into the current language era, provocatively, around about weekly, by…Dad of Donegal!
Pausing from work life to nothing – as I did on Friday 9 June 2023 – has been an exercise of which I’ve long dreamt. It must have been in my late twenties, that I stumbled on an article in the weekend papers.
The FT Weekend magazine no doubt, that peachy-pink pile that remains a favorite Saturday-Sunday indulgence. (FT being Financial Times, one of the last standing ‘proper’ journalism newspapers, that’s avoided the drift to gentle propaganda for one side or the other).
The article told the story of a professional woman, in her thirties, who shunned the conventional wisdom of ‘the easiest way to get a job is in a job’ to instead choose to just stop. To take a break from the centrifuge of professional life. Purely to pause, to live well for a few months away from career and work identities. To replenish. And to then decide again.
Now that makes absolute sense to me, I remember thinking, especially since I idolize the idea too of not being retired out to some back paddock to chew grass, but working late into life albeit at a slowing pace. Plus I have this operating system glitch in my head where the words ‘conventional wisdom’, create a visual signpost to run a mile in the other direction. Smile.
As Mark Twain is reported to have said…“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
‘Project Blank Canvas’ I’ve called it, to close friends in San Francisco in recent weeks, outing an expression that has been in my head for years. Take a deliberate pause from the centrifuge of our fast modern lives, with their velocity of connection and their weighty aspirations that we’ll carry in a million directions nowadays. A mini-retirement, but when you’re still in your prime.
Allow yourself to savour, and to think through some of the whispers of clues about ourselves in life, and the trade-offs we choose. A few months most likely. Or more than that…a year, even?! Or, two or three (Editor note: I can’t feel that being likely, right now…!) – per one great surf friend of old, Seth, who took his family sailing around the world (and sold me his car) from the place of a comfortable Marin life in two senior corporate roles, YouTubed it all and has crafted a re-designed path since, in Florida (see The Sailing Family).
I was the most anxious about it, for about three minutes, in a 20% anxious kind of way, on 8 June, the eve of my last day at work. Before quickly the best advice I’ve ever had came to mind. ‘Back yourself’, as great school friend Ben Richardson said to me in 2010 as I headed off to Bali to surf after a fund I was working on was wound down, an epoch that led to my move to San Francisco. Back yourself that it will all work out just fine. Back yourself that it might quite possibly be a very rich and important era of your life, in terms of what happens next…
Just one promise I made in setting out, that I’ll write along the way…
Three Postcards will share weekly pictures and jottings from a deliciously tasty era in my life. Sauntering in curiosity, writing from conversations and moments along the way, and staying in touch…
