Breaking through Clouds

My journey for fun and mastery.

I’m looking around at my middle-aged life and realizing I built it for comfort. I have my health, my family, and satisfying work. But one thing I don’t have enough of is fun. So I started casting about trying to figure out how to have fun. So where does any middle-aged, middle-class man turn for fun? The bookstore! That’s where I came across The Fun Habit by Mike Rucker. I’ve found it helpful. After all, what’s better than having fun? Why, reading about it, of course!

Once I got home, I dived into the book. Just kidding, I watched 2 hours of Lionel Messi highlights on YouTube. I love seeing how happy he and his teammates are after scoring an impossible goal.

My comfort zone in life is to be above average. I’m most content — as are we all — to have, to do, and to be better than most but not so good as to attract attention.

image my author, Christian James

I love soccer. I played in high school, and my teammate and coaches described my play as “adequate, close enough, and you’ll get it next time.” So rather than struggle to improve, I quit. I settled for watching greatness because most of us have to. We can’t all be born Latin football phenoms.

But how did I get to this comfortable but sometimes uneventful life? Several years ago, I gave up an undistinguished career in business administration to become a Physician Assistant (PA). I had to get out of my comfort zone to get there. At the time, PA schools only accepted 5% of applicants. That meant I had to get here:

image my author, Christian James

With that goal in mind, I took steps to get there. I needed a variety of college courses as prerequisites with good but not necessarily perfect grades. Useful work experience. But most importantly, recommendations from people who could help.

So I went off to EMT school. After about six months, I was driving an ambulance around town in a BLS rig. I got a glimpse of medicine on every floor in the hospital. I was in and out of Emergency Departments all day. I got to meet a lot of PAs and doctors. I even told a few I wanted to be a PA.

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

Eventually, I was on an ALS rig which mostly involved sitting and waiting for someone to have an emergency, then driving them to the ED. I parleyed my ED connections into a job as an ER tech at a local hospital, comfortably the best $13/hour job I’ve ever had. I worked with many wonderful nurses and learned much about helping patients in terrible moments. I had a lot of freedom to float around the ED and join wherever the excitement was. The doctors and PAs I worked with would eventually write strong letters of recommendation for me.

At the same time, I was tutoring science classes at a local community college. Did I know what I was doing? Barely! But I had taken all the courses I tutored, and teaching is the best way to learn. So I found myself working three part-time jobs while taking needed prerequisites for PA school and making half the money I was used to. All of this felt like “a lot.” Then I got into PA school and found out what “a lot” really felt like.

It’s been a few years now, and I have settled in as a PA in the ED. It’s been a humbling journey. I have fewer moments of panic and terror than I did during my first year on the job. I work with terrific, supportive colleagues. We all survived, struggled, and adapted to a historic pandemic. (Though sadly, a lot of wonderful people didn’t).

Now I have my health, family, career, and disposable income. Things are comfortable. But I’m looking for that next rung on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I’m realizing now that life is best in the transition between struggle and mastery. Those episodes of strife last longer than we’d like. But if you keep at it, you will break through the clouds and find yourself on a sun-drenched mountaintop, which is fantastic! Then it gets boring. Then you look around and see a dozen other taller mountains and feel nostalgic for the struggle.