Whirling Dervishes: finding peace in the dance of change

Sometimes I wake up 2:30, 3:30 in the morning unable to get back to sleep. If I make it to 4:30 I'm doing well. Mind racing with so much important work to do. So many loose threads needing tying. So many Jira tickets to create to not lose the threads when I know they're not going to be able to get picked up tomorrow. Being a manager of security stuff isn't for the completion-ist or someone who is always wanting perfection. It's messy and complicated and directly tied into workflows and work streams of an entire company.

I get out of bed cause I really can't sleep and just spinning in my thoughts without writing anything down or doing any of the work seems wasteful and lazy. I take the coffee grinder out to the garage to not wake anyone up, feed my dog Reba, and let the slow drip of caffeine into my veins bring clarity to the scattered thoughts to isolate one thread and began to pull.

The witching hour is my time of productivity. The time I can actually do the strategy and program work which feeds my soul. Once 6am rolls around and the light turns green, my boys know they can leave their room and, like labs smelling birds in the air on a crisp fall day, they want to play. Kurt asks to wrestle and box. Danny wants a board game. It's time to refill the coffee and make some breakfast. Meetings start around 7:30 and go nearly all day with slivers of breaks in between. It's easy to whine and complain but this is the work I signed up for. This is the price of being a part a small company doing big things. Of wearing multiple hats and trying to be fully present with all the various priorities of a cloud migration, Hitrust and SOC II audits, rethinking how we do clinical care delivery, and building a new app experience to best deliver advanced primary care. I don't say that in resignation. I say that in honesty. There is no free lunch. Something always has to give. And it doesn't mean I'm not constantly thinking about and executing on how to refactor my time to get the most from it: how to best prioritize and protect my family time, how to make physical and mental health equally as important as my career, how to be a present friend, an active mentor, a dad who has real relationships with his kids, and a husband who has fun with his wife and falls deeper in love as time goes on.

I've found for myself that the key to my survival and moving from a place of frustration and complaining to actually enjoying work again has been these early morning working sessions. I really don't do well operating in a reactive mode. I need to be planning, implementing, doing things with intention and not just responding to the tyranny of the urgent.

It's hard to write these things and not self judge.

I know some of you are probably thinking - "Quiz, you gotta get sleep. You are going to burn yourself out." And truth is you're right. Especially if I'm not adjusting on the other side and going to bed earlier. Cutting out late night activities. I'm not 25 anymore. Don't really have much business staying up past 9 or 10 knowing my body is going to wake me early.

But this is me. This is how I operate. I can't turn my brain off. I can't not care about stuff. My superpower is an insane focus on what I set my mind to. I go all in. The real trick I'm learning is to how to organize my life around that and how to challenge myself with expanding the circles I'm intentional in so that focus expands to the other things I want it to. So that I'm the one directing my life, writing the pages in it, and authoring the story.