'I need a vacation from my self.'

We all have a job to do. Your job is something you trained for or something that you fell into, to sustain your life style.

I am in the latter category.

I like my job, most of the time. I usually find the mental and physical challenges stimulating to say the least. I work with a small crew of five, including my self. We take care of an entire warehouse between the hours of two and ten P.M.

Having been at my company for over eleven years, I am beginning to show major signs of burn out.

No matter what great morning I went through -especially Thursday- my mood sinks as soon as I hit the parking lot of the warehouse. I eat the days foraging, sinking ever further into the little ball that I become when I am getting ready to clock in.

I used to extend hellos to people, now I just shrug or say 'hi' quickly and don't make eye contact.

I lead the stretch break with mild enthusiasm, and then we begin the process...the same process.

The same brown boxes being moved. The same dreary grey warehouse and the same sameness over and over again.

UGH.

Which is why I propose this, my friends.

A sabbatical.

An employee should be evaluated for job fatigue by out Human Resources department an told they need to go on a sabbatical. We should be given an alloted amount of time to return to work and to re evaluate and reflect on our job and our position at said job in the first place.

My job has a leave of absence program, which is nice, but there is no guarantee any more that your job will be there when you return.

Personally speaking, I could use a solid three months off. I am due for another cross country trek. The last one was in 1993 and it left me with enough memories to last well into the 2000's.

I need a reboot, badly.

It's not enough to tell my self: 'you have a baby on the way, stay the course. Don't try to get another job because the economy and job market are crap. Don't forget how great he company is for you monetarily.'

Even that ideal in some but not all respects, has become burned out.

I could go on tour as a roadie for a friends band. I could get in my car and drive, drive, drive. I could see Chicago again. I could finish writing my music and help get the house in order. I could really push my self to become more healthy than I am now and regain my focus. I could enrich my self through learning, music, art, culture again without having to arrange those pursuits around a work schedule.

But reality is a cruel bitch. We have to do the things we do.

Most of us do that thing for someone else. It's just one of life's little inconveniences.
It is also, in some respects, what makes us who we are.
To mess with that line of reality in my circumstance could have an effect on more than my self. I remember that every day and it keeps me grounded and it makes me less selfish.
So what I really need to do is try to focus on the better things that are going on in my life, remembering why I am at my job: it lets me have everything that I have.

Which is why I and a couple of billion others rise to the occasion. To fulfill someone else's orders, to move someone else's product, to make someone else's meal, to take out someone else's garbage, to mend someone else's fracture, to govern someone else's land, to harvest someone else's food, to feed someone else's kids, to fight someone else's war.

If i don't do this, someone else will right?!?