Once, while in India, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Meghan, a 26-year-old programmer who had recently been laid off from Google.  As we ate our thalis and protected our purses from the thieving monkeys who make no distinction between tree and rooftop, she told me why she was there.  It seemed simple enough.  When she was fired, she sold everything: car, house… everything, bought a plane ticket and a rucksack and came to India with the intention of traveling until either her money or her resolve ran out.  She described for me the atmosphere of corporate life in San Francisco, one that had during the short span of her employment degenerated into a maddening microcosm of paranoia.  Like London during the Blitz, questions of where the next bomb would hit and what supposedly indestructible institution would be a pile of smoldering ashes in the morning replaced speculations about promotions, and who had sent resumes to where replaced, “so what did you do this weekend?”  When the bomb hit Google and the pink slips started circulating, many of her colleagues scampered to the next job, trying to hold onto their prescribed notion of success and adulthood.

But not Meghan. She realized that she had wasted her early twenties trying to look good on paper and had forgotten to look up from the race.  She said the night she was laid off; she laid in bed thinking about her childhood dream, to ride an elephant, and had, at 3:00 in the morning, booked her ticket to India: economy class and one way. I recognized her smile; it was the same one I had worn for 3 months, ever since I had set foot in India.  The conversation soon shifted to books, the struggles of maintaining hygiene and sanity while in India and other non-sequiturs, but her story stuck with me.

I often think of her when I watch the news and recoil at the numbers of layoffs flashing across the screen because at least one of them is bound to be someone who, in the middle of the night and in the middle of the darkness of economic recession, recalls dreams from years past; before credit card debt, “practical” college degrees, mortgage payments and before we “grew up.”

Change is undeniably scary, and big, life-altering change is enough to send even the most stoic into a frenzy, but not all change is bad.  I mean, I’m not one of those “when life gives you lemons” people.  In fact, I find them pretentious, annoying and probably the most scared of all of us, but I do believe in re-centering and in going back to the basics.  In the case of Meghan, that meant making a life long dream, despite its ridiculousness, a reality.  Sure, the economy is bad, an sure, lots of places are dangerous, but the exchange rate for the dollar is at all time highs in many places, and most people in other countries return open mindedness and kindness in like.  So I guess the point of this post is to tell you to just go out and do it, man.

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