Travel and Self-Awarness.

[Sad_Widower]

So I have been travelling on business all week (the first time since my wife’s passing) and it has really got me thinking. 

I was in a fraternity house… met my wife, who I became MADLY in love with and just months later I found myself in board room of a start-up company (with no clue as to what I was doing). How did this happen?

NOTE: Please undertand the absolute last thing I am doing his “bragging” in this post.  I can see how this can construed, as such…however It’s actually the complete opposite (as I take zero credit for it). I just want to ensure this is realized. 

First, I want you to understand I work for an incredibly large company with deep pockets. (Prior to here I was at Bank of America and before that JP Morgan/Chase - and my current employer is much bigger than both of them.). 

This means I sometimes enter a different world. My plane ride here was first class, I am staying right on the Boston harbor for a week in hotel suite that is twice the size of the apartment my wife and I first lived in. 
Prime-rib breakfasts, Morton’s Steakhouse for lunch, and $200 per night dinners (w/drinks included) is the norm.  

I mention all this simply because as I sit here, I realize I have more in common with the people serving us our lunch than I do with any of the other executives I am surrounded by.  This is no exaggeration. 

Please know I did not come from money.  My neighborhood (6 square miles) was considered the most dangerous  neighborhood in the city that was murder capital in the US during my HS years. 

My wife came from money—but I have never accepted one cent from her family. I am the only in-law who hasn’t. 

So I ponder here in these executive meetings. …I look around and see all these younger guys (early 40’s) and it’s what they were obviously groomed for in life.  It’s the life they have always wanted. 
This setting  is old news to me (been there done that at the highest level)…and never cared about any of it.  
So how did I get here? Why is it I, (internally) stick out like a sore thumb—and am the only one who realizes this?

I tell you this as it really reiterated how much I loved my wife.  I wanted her, so desperately to have the best life possible, I somehow stepped out of my comfort zone and positioned myself in this world.  In other words 100% of whatever success I’ve had is because of her. 
I no longer want this life. At all.  I’m only doing it for the following:
- It’s really all I know from a career perspective.  
- I get paid well. 

Other than that I am done.  I am waiting to get my passport then outta here…off to India.  
There is a small chance my company might keep me on (as 1/2 the people who report to me live in India) but it doesn’t matter to me either way.  
I just reflect on how HARD I worked and made the impossible in to a possibility…and in all candor, my wife gets most of the credit. Had it not been the love I have for her, I don’t know.  
But she’s gone and so is my drive.  I just go through the motions to keep myself afloat until I can leave here and drop out of the rat race.  Instead I will happily give it all away to contour doing somethng that drives me from the heart. 

[kayc]

How long are you going to India for?  

[Boho-Soul]

This echoes your life-changing decision to move to India that you posted in another thread you started back on July 15. You also shared you were going there to disperse your wife’s ashes, and were staying to open an orphanage in her name. It sounds like your business trip helped to solidify this decision.