a.k.a. V.J.

Earlier this year, during my brief period of unemployment, a mostly forgotten 1980s song became something of an anthem for me. The song was “Day by Day” from a Canadian band called Doug and the Slugs. It’s sung from the vantage point of a guy doing his best to bounce back from a rough patch in life.

The lyrics appealed to me because they are neither gloomy nor traditionally “inspirational.” They are simply about knowing who you are and using that self-awareness as a source of strength in the face of adversity. The line that resonated strongest with me was:

I just do what I do and I do it
Day by day by day by day

Not exactly Earth-shattering profundity, but it pretty much sums up my approach to life in recent years. I have a idiosyncratic way of making my way through the world. My approach is not optimized. It’s not strategic. It’s not TED Talk-worthy. It’s probably not even logically consistent. It’s really just a set of mundane habits and (mostly) adaptive coping mechanisms I’ve accumulated over the decades. I think about life and about the world around me a great deal, but I don’t think much at all about how I navigate either. I just sort of plod along the way I always have, and things tend to work out okay for me in the end.

There’s a Taoist concept I’ve read about called wu wei. It translates as not-acting or non-doing. Wu wei is often explained as the idea of unforced activity or being in a flow state. I’m not sure if my way of life would meet a Taoist’s standard of wu wei, but I do think it resides somewhere in that neighborhood. It might be just as simple as having lived long enough that years of continuous wear have smoothed out any friction between the moving parts.

My new/old job certainly has been feeling that way (wei?). For the past two months, I have been back at the company where I learned most of what I know about market research. I am in an analyst role, doing pretty much the same kind of work I started doing there back in 2003. It’s an unforgivable cliche to say that an activity is like riding a bicycle because you never forget how to do it, but that’s the analogy that I’ve been using, because it’s so apt. I’m surprised at how comfortably I have slipped back into old routines from a job I had left 12 years ago.

That’s not to say the transition has been adjustment-free. The technology involved has advanced, and there has been a learning curve getting up to speed with the new tools of the trade. Otherwise, the day-to-day experience has mostly been like putting on a well-broken-in pair of shoes. The mental wiring I developed via long-term repetition 20-plus years ago to analyze data, write reports, and talk to clients about findings never atrophied. After about a week on the job, it all clicked back in, and it has felt like I’ve been largely operating in a flow state ever since.

Life outside of work has begun to feel that way too. Maybe a better way to say that is that life inside of work and outside of work have started to feel more integrated, like it’s all simply life. I’m not really sure why. If there was a way that I could trace the steps of my path to contentment and share them with people, I would. I’d at least try to write a book and make money from a disgruntled world that seems desperate for that kind of roadmap. But the truth is, I’m really on some sort of beneficial late-in-life autopilot. I just do what I do. And I do it day by day by day by day.