In life one of the hard lessons I’ve learned is that there’s a profound difference between wanting and getting. Wanting leaves open the window of great expectations where the actual getting has the hard finality of real world consequences. For most of my post-teaching professional career, the only thing on earth I wanted to do was run my own operations center and be at the center of the action. It’s a hell of a way to live and almost never a dull moment.

While I’ve held my own over the last year and even excelled at some points, what I have discovered is that my real talents don’t lie in running an operation. They lie in developing the grand strategies and seeing the big picture that the entire organization will follow. With my own frustration rising to a point that I haven’t seen since I was still teaching, I decided it was time for a change.

To make a long story shortish, I asked my boss if he would endorse a reassignment if I formally requested one. He offered training and a lot of other things to try to change my decision, but I think even he knows that if I’m talking about it openly, my mind is made up. So, yeah, I’m putting the wheels in motion for another change. If all goes well, I’ll still be here in Memphis, just down the hall from where I’m sitting now. Someone once told me that I seem happiest when I’m the calm center surrounded by mayhem and chaos. Maybe that’s true… and since nature has been letting me down in the mayhem and chaos department, perhaps I’ve decided to create my own.