Ten Year Declaration
Sunrise is flirting with the tower trail ridgeline over my shoulder above CalPoly. My wife lay asleep in her favorite: quiet, crisp, clean hotel sheets. Our tenth wedding anniversary was yesterday, and to celebrate, we flew into San Luis Obispo for a weekend of rest and engagement. Not even one of our four kids is with us.
This brand new hotel chair I sit typing in wasn’t consciously built to hold this weight. My 225 pounds are not breaking the chair, but this is not all it is holding. This cushion is supporting more than my bodily form; it is the fulcrum of the past, present, and future coalescing here now. It is essential to understand that the last I was in SLO was twenty years ago for four formative years. These years spent here were a great untangling of self apart from my family unit and the germination of artistic/literary ideals, all forged in the churning cold chaos of the pacific shoreline’s whitewater. I am who I am today because of the impoverished confused son of one thousand summers that I once was here in SLO.
Let me explain, precisely ten years ago today, the morning after our wedding, I also woke up before Julie. She also lay in hotel sheets, and I had a completely different mindset and expectation of the future than I now know. (Part of this came to me while looking at my iPhone that morning, I discovered that remnants of our oversized bridal party had stayed up late to party hard at the resort hot tub and certain clothing items were unable to be located after that.) The future was ultimately a blank slate, except we had purchased a home in Gilbert that we would move into after our honeymoon, and we knew we wanted to make a family together. At the time, Julie was the marketing communications manager for a small military-communications business line in the defense industry, and I was working as a community liaison for a large hospice company. We had just closed escrow on a house, had an epic wedding, and were heading to Banff, Canada in a few hours — filled with every joy and hope our hearts could contain.
We had only hypothetical plans to have four-ish kids; we had no idea that Julie would leave nine years of job security at one of the nation's largest defense companies only to start a successful photography business, and then another. We had no plan that I would go back to working in “big pharma” for multiple companies, and then right before the birth of our fourth child (a surprise blessing) that I would choose to leave corporate job security and join a firefighter neighbor to work for him on his side hustle for two years, before leaving tired and disappointed. We certainly had no plan to start our own company to serve small businesses in consulting and marketing. How could we know?
Sitting here, we know that there are ten more years in the future to the “twenty years of marriage mark” — years that are unscripted. I do know that in ten years, God willing, I will have an eighteen-year-old daughter that will be going to college soon, and even my youngest daughter will be twelve! My life will look incredibly different this morning twenty years hence, as Julie lay in hotel sheets before sunrise.
Though much is out of my hands, the future that I can choose will be formed by how I behave in my family, community, and business. Who and how I choose to align myself with or not. I can choose to father my family well in a time of great cultural fatherlessness. I can dedicate myself to truth and accuracy, focused work, solution ideation; while shunning selfishness, trickery, and manipulation. We are grateful for the few bosses that were accidentally present but thoroughly manipulative, who provided lessons in what it is like to follow an unfit leader in a wake of confusion. Conversely; the two of us are even more grateful for all of the great leaders under whom we have served, with long vision, short-term plans, courage, and who fostered environments that breed health and true clarity.
There is a vast world of work out there ahead of us, and we are truly thankful for the great opportunities that have already come to Griffin Brand and Business LLC.
The unknown ahead has always and will always be a source of joy for the bold adventurer not afraid of chaos.
We are leaving behind the “order of the known” and marching toward unknown future opportunities (see the children’s book What Do You Do With a Problem?).
So bring on the chaos! Bring your brokenness! Bring your confusion! Bring the seeds of your dreams that are in pots too small! Julie and I are eager to help, and thankful for the opportunity to be part of your story.