Reliving Youth

Tomorrow I leave home for my summer job. It feels like I’m back in college, when I worked one summer in Nantucket, MA and another in Los Angeles. Except now I’m 53.

I’ll be working as a seasonal tennis pro at a large tennis resort in an East Coast beach town. I already had a taste of the resort tennis teaching life for my first long weekend in May. It was a welcome break from the career grind and mundane office environment.

This summer’s job reflects the saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” It certainly was not part of a long-term plan, but born out of necessity to change course, re-imagine life and re-adjust on the fly in response to circumstances.

At midlife, I’m embracing the idea that life does not have to be lived only one way. You can have a grind-it-out, 40-hour per week job, year-in and year-out. Or you can find another way to make a living in this gig economy, while trying to steal back more time, flexibility and independence. And with that, more purpose, meaning and passion.

I’m also embracing the philosophy of minimalism, or at least trying to limit my spending, cut costs, reduce my income needs and live a simplified life that maximizes enjoyment and meaning and minimizes stress. That’s what this summer will be all about.

My full-time employment in public relations ended in October 2015, for various reasons. One was that reality sunk in about the challenges performing a full-time job, working a part-time internship in a new field as a counselor at an outpatient mental health clinic, and taking graduate school classes in counseling, not to mention trying to function as a father and husband. I soon realized that trying to do all of these would be to do them all half-assed, and be constantly exhausted and over-stressed. My job had gone south anyway, so the break was a relief.

But I left that job with no clear plan on how to produce income while I completed the final two years of my counseling program, including two intensive nearly year-long internships. I fell back on teaching tennis, which I had done during previous job layoffs. I was lucky to pick up weekend hours with a Baltimore-based tennis academy. Then the idea occurred to me: Why not apply to resorts that need additional instructors for busy summer tennis seasons, while I was in between semesters with no internship or classes? With the help of a good connection, I landed the Sea Colony position.

I’m looking forward to it. It should be a great summer. Being at the beach in a resort town, working outside doing something fun, working with a team that has a passion for tennis, getting paid to help people improve at what they enjoy, meeting many people, making new friends. Hard to beat that, and sure as hell beats sitting at a desk in a stuffy office staring at a computer screen for eight hours a day.

Of course, it won’t be all fun and games. I need to make money to fund me and my wife’s living, my education and my two kids’ college educations. So I’ll have to hustle and promote myself to line up as many private lessons and clinics as I can, in addition to the many clinics the resort schedules every day. That should be great practice for the when I become a counselor with an independent practice.

A friend referred to this time in my life – a summer teaching tennis sandwiched by counseling internships, classes and part-time jobs with no full-time job as an anchor – as a “reset.” It sure feels like a step back in time for me, all the way to the relatively more carefree and low stress days of college. Make no mistake, there’s some scrambling and anxiousness involved. But I’m grateful for the respite, happy, excited about the challenges, and optimistic about the future. You can’t really relive your youth, but if you can add some youthful exuberance and new experiences to your life – and even some motivating uncertainty — you can recapture some of those feelings. And that’s healthy at any age.