Simplification

As a new opportunity that I can't turn down suddenly appears to me, one that dovetails nicely with everything Enterra does and represents, I find that I need to simplify the career track right now.

As everybody is presently clearing decks and reordering priorities, it's a great time for me as well, now that the book effort is fundamentally consummated.

So one decision's now be made: by mutual agreement, Oak Ridge National Lab and I are going to part ways. It was a very nice run, in which I learned a lot, but the monthly time commitment had lost a lot of its appeal for me a while ago (there is only so much traveling one can do in a year), and so when my main sponsor there went into semi-retirement, the timing seemed right and we decided to pull the plug this morning.

Naturally, my ties--by extension--to U Tennessee's Howard Baker Center disappear, but frankly, that relationship had also pretty much gone away once the director who signed me up had left to run George W. Bush's presidential library, so the timing's good there too.

I did enjoy getting to know east Tennessee, but the grind of four commuter flights every month to get there and back . . . that won't be missed. Instead, this new opportunity will be DC-focused--much easier to access and good overlap with Enterra travel.

I'd like to publicly thank everybody at Oak Ridge who helped me over the years--going back to late 2005. Again, it was a wonderful experience to interact with such world-class talent.

There is some question as to whether or not I'll keep the column going, which began years ago as part of my eastern Tennessee portfolio. I knew I wanted to keep it through Great Powers, but I didn't have any plans beyond that. It is a certain mental effort to crank a new one each week, and I need to think hard about whether or not I can fit that in over the coming months, given Enterra's intimidating upward trajectory.

Knoxville News-Sentinel's boss Jack McElroy has indicated that he'd really like me to keep doing it. He just decided to move my column to Saturday in the rotation--a very nice sign of faith in an era where downsizing is the norm for print papers (indeed, times are extraordinarily grim). So I took it as a real compliment that KNS wanted to keep the column despite a reorganization of the Sunday issue.

I've contacted Scripps Howard to gauge their desire. The service has been very good to me, and I'd like to see if we can maintain the link.

Thinking about it, I realize that I did a biweekly column for about a year with KNS before gearing up for a weekly one. I've been weekly since KNS started uploading to Scripps back in October 2006.

Sunday will be my 148th column overall, and perhaps my last in the series. Sad to consider, but I like to be realistic about schedules and this may be the thing that needs to go versus the blog or continuing to write for Esquire. The emerging opportunity will simply demand a certain amount of time.

Sad but exciting at the same time. I honestly like big shifts in my career. As soon as I start feeling too comfortable about my constellation, my instinct is remap it dramatically. I guess I fear staleness most of all--haunted by that "bouncing the rubble" metaphor.

My wife always says I'm happiest when I'm doing things like traveling heavily with Steve and collaborating with him, or when I get new opportunities like this one coming up, so it seems like a good, safe choice in these times to go with things that bring me a lot of joy, keep me creative, and build upon things about which I care deeply.

You know, I think it's finally starting to hit me that I'm going to be a father again.