I am considering a change. I hear a lot of women who send the first one off to college and have one more in high school look around and think: What’s next?

The truth is I don’t know. I don’t even know what I want to be next. But it has got me thinking about work and Work and how there are different types of work. Maybe I think of types of work differently than other people.

Thought Work is what I have done during my career – but does it have to be thought work to be a career? Some people would say so. I don’t agree. As I consider what path I want to take next, I am struck by the fact that both things I am considering are Thought Work. Do I want to be an author? Do I want to try and be a coder? A software creator who develops the code other people need. As I was weighing the options and the path to get from here to there, it struck me that I want to do things that separate me from other people. I want to let my thoughts develop and bring me money.

To me, both jobs could be careers. To me, both jobs involve creating within a structure for gain.

Deed work is all those people who are working jobs that can’t be done remotely¹I mean, there are other examples of deed work. This is just how I see it.. As I, and others like me, struggle with employer demands we return to the office, it is easy to forget how many people didn’t get to take a break from the office. They didn’t get the privilege of having to balance a kid on a computer trying to go to school with completing their own work. You can’t harvest vegetables remotely²Yet. If some people hadn’t been out there keeping on with their jobs, we would be in a much worse place now as we move into accepting a new disease as part of life.

LittleOne expresses interest in deed work from time to time. He asks me if being a construction worker is a good idea. I try to change the message I got as a child when I pass it along to my children. College is one path. There are other paths. The goal, in my mind, is to never stop learning.

As I look back on my work life in order to choose a new direction, I remembered something interesting. At one point, I was so disenchanted with my management and so disappointed with the results of my systems engineering, I started dreaming of going back to being a dishwasher in a chain pizza place³The first job I had that gave me a W-2 at the end of the year.. Seriously. I dreamed this awake and I dreamed this asleep. I thought to myself – at least I would feel clean at the end of a day of work.

I didn’t open a restaurant. I didn’t get a job in a restaurant. I changed my situation by changing who I worked for and what I worked on. I stayed with thought work.

Sometimes, I dream about opening a bookstore or tea shop⁴I am a dreamer.. I like to bake, and I keep thinking my cookies and pies would sell⁵They wouldn’t. The truth is, my deed work needs some… work..

No work is done in a closed system unless there is both thought and deed. 

My second least favorite boss ever used to come into my office⁶At least I finally got an office with that position. and tell me I think too much. It infuriated me. Was it misogynistic? Was he crazy? I never really took him seriously enough to consider what he meant.

But now, as I see an inflection point coming and I feel a desire within myself to make a change, I am beginning to understand what he meant. I do think too much, and I somehow feel my thoughtfulness excuses the fact that my cookies don’t come out perfectly round and my pie crust could be better crimped. I evaluate myself as better at thought work, but I am not sure I have a good reason to think that. My baking is tasty and when I worked in food service, I did ok.

The years are turning, and I think my time to focus on deeds work, if it is going to be a career, is a window I am looking at. When I was growing up, it was a given in my house that college meant thought work and thought work meant career and success. We never really talked about it, but it seemed more important that I engage in thought work than my brother. To prove something I could barely understand was an assumption. 

I don’t know what is next. I don’t know if it is thought work or deed work and which tasks I will turn my thoughts to. What I do know is that it is ok that I am thinking about change. It is ok that maybe I can figure out how to have more deeds mixed with my thoughts and how to employ more thoughtfulness in my deeds.