The Pro and Con of Normal

I spend a lot of time going back and forth about whether I like excitement or calmness in my life. I can’t tell if I feel more this way about life than others, but I certainly expect that I am not alone in this quandary. When things are too exciting, I yearn for stability and normalcy and when things get too normal, I get bored and start seeking out excitement. Sound familiar? If I broaden out that concept to more general lifestyle approaches, the swings are still in evidence. After a somewhat turbulent youth spent living in four countries and three different parts of the U.S., I headed off to college in Ithaca, New York after three years in Rome, interspersed with various travels year round across Europe and the Mediterranean region (including North Africa). Most people would consider that a pretty exciting upbringing, but of course, to me, it was just my life as I knew it. I then spent the next five years of undergraduate and graduate school settling into what I can only characterize as a normal and somewhat staid domestic college existence. I had a few friends who wandered off to semesters abroad (which I thought was nuts) and I stayed put, even choosing to spend most summers and holidays in Ithaca given the distance between me and home. That distance was perhaps both physical and psychological since my mother had raised me to think of home as a concept rather than a place. Given her roots in the Ithaca area and the relatives I still had in the neighborhood, Ithaca was as much my home in short order as Rome ever was. I was very happy to be hunkering down in Ithaca and had very little wanderlust in me in those years.

When I was approaching graduation a combination of my studies and my heritage was starting to push me towards the thought of a career that would be as far-flung as my mothers had been. As I contemplated a life in international development (more or less the academic path I had been following), the thought of 8-10 years of international postings working in the exciting, but backwater parts of the world started to feel less appealing than staying in the United States. It was that thinking that made me susceptible to the notion being put forth by my best friend, Paul, that I should join him at business school. Lives and careers often hinge on butterfly wing flaps and sure enough, I succumbed to the siren song of staying in Ithaca for that extra year and pursuing a course of business education that would pretty much define my life. The universe wasn’t completely satisfied, so when I got my first job in banking a year later, the bias was to push me towards working in the Europe Division. To be fair, 80% of the bank’s profitability was coming from its international business and they did have a need for a junior officer to go work in the Milan office, but going back to Italy (actually less that, than just leaving the United States) was not so appealing to me. I had mates in my training program who were dying for an international assignment. One took one as our assistant rep in Caracas. I was fortunate enough to have a strong enough early reputation to get to choose, and I chose to stay working in the U.S.. In fact, I chose a first assignment in a very staid area as the junior officer covering the more rural portions of New England. It doesn’t get more “normal” than that.

I spent almost four years working my way up from number three man on a three man team to Team Leader for New England, calling on all the banks and insurance companies in the region. There was not a road I hadn’t traveled in New England and, especially given my three years living in Maine, it felt a lot like being home and living a “normal” life. During those years I got married, bought a house (several actually) and had two kids. I was deep into normal. Then, as always seems to happen, things started to change. Once again, I can’t figure out whether I was getting antsy or if circumstances just started pitching curve balls my way. Either way, I started moving from normal to exciting in my life…at least in my work life, which was a big part of life for me at that time. First, I was transferred from the banking floor to the trading floor…that alone is a pretty exciting change. From that I was suddenly and without much warning, asked by senior management to take over first Latin America and then the rest of the less developed markets of the world. From calling on savings banks in northern Vermont to traveling one week to Chile and the next to West Africa was almost like the definition of moving from normalcy to excitement. In the same way I had embraced the mainstream of domestic banking a decade earlier, I completely embraced the fast lane of traveling the world in search of problems to solve and opportunities to exploit. I don’t think I thought too much about all this while it was going on, but its clear that there have been times in my life when I wanted less excitement and other times when the beast reared up inside of me and craved the unknown.

That pattern of chasing excitement continued from one gig to another from the emerging markets to derivatives to traveling the world as a private banker and then through a combination of asset management assignments, venture capital and hedge fund stints that found me in places like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada and just about every exotic locale you can think of. I’ve taken a boat up a river in Malaysia to visit a client and followed a truckload of AK-47 toting guards to an ammonia plant in central Pakistan (followed by a meeting with a ruling general in Islamabad). I’m sure there were people who had more exciting careers with more diversity…but not too many. And yet, that need for excitement once again started to run thin. This time it did so at a time when it is supposed to fade, when it was time to retire. Now, when others still seek out exciting investment deals and chances to run around the world being big wheels, I am happy to do what others probably consider boring work like teaching and being an expert witness. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about either and most of the work is in the shadows, but that somehow suits me now in ways it wouldn’t have at other times. I suppose everything has its season and this is now my season to be normal. To sit at home and ponder projects and writing stories, to putter in the garden and take walks through the neighborhood. And here’s the thing…it is not only enough, it is my preference. I’m done with exciting and am happy leaving that to others who either didn’t didn’t get enough of it in their lives or simply have a limitless desire for it. I don’t want to pretend that I never wanted excitement, I did. But I also know that I have given normal equal time and am happy to be in the normal zone now and for the rest of my life. Normal is underrated.