This Is My Zen Life

I went into work one morning, determined to apply the principles of living in the moment to my job. This is me, at 6 am, measuring ingredients and batching product. This is me watching 500 pounds of sugar grains sparkle like tiny diamonds as I pour bag after bag into a gigantic high speed mixing vat.

This is me at 8 am, coordinating warehouse traffic, stacking pallets of product--a giant Rubik’s Cube puzzle colored only in shades of beige cardboard. This is me at 11 am, overseeing filling equipment. Row after row of emerald bottles arrive like train cars, stopping to load up - then moving down the track again to the next station.

This is me at 1 pm driving a forklift onto a produce trailer, the smell of sweet apples and crisp cucumbers filling my nose. This is me at 3 pm getting told I need to clean out my desk and leave the building. 10 years of routine, stripped away in 10 minutes.

This is me downsized and living in the moment.

A long ride home, a weekend of deep thought, lots of discussion and research led my wife and I to one conclusion: We needed to leave Northwest Ohio and seek out a better economy. We knew the longer we stayed, the faster our resources would dry up. We looked at relocating to any number of areas, and our search became a bit of a Dr. Seuss rhyme.

Would they be loggers in Seattle?
Or sell tea in Boston?
Would they pack meat in Chicago?
Or rustle cattle in Austin?
Bake cupcakes in L.A.? or even N.Y.?
No, no. The cost of living there was too high.
They looked closer to home, east of the Dakotas,
And in the end settled on the Twin Cities of Minnesota.

So in four short weeks, we cleared out the homestead, packed up the essentials and moved on down the road to a brighter job market:

Minnesota or Bust.