Leaving the Tall Grass
"Gotta catch 'em all!" It's the catchphrase of an infamous game and cartoon, Pokémon. In both, you run around in the tall grass and try to acquire Pokémon to fill up your Pokédex. But catching them is just the start. In order to make your Pokémon powerful, they have to evolve. That means keeping them in your party. You’ve got to walk with them, battle with them – invest time into leveling them up.
Looking back over my previous career, I spent a good bit of time filling up my Corporate-dex. I spent twenty years collecting the logos most designers dream of. Agencies, tech giants, the kind of names that make people nod at parties. I was always running to the next patch of tall grass looking to catch the next shiny role. Then the world stopped during the pandemic. And a thought I couldn’t shake: who had I become? What had I achieved? It was time to stop trying to catch them all and evolve just one. Me.
Today, I work in a pharmacy. I’m surrounded by veterans of not only the craft, but of retail as well. Every day I come to work knowing that the people by my side have held the line for 6, 10, 20, or even 40 years. The dedication. The perseverance. The younger version of me would have scoffed at staying in one place that long. I’d seen it as stagnation. But now, standing next to them, I see the undeniable weight of what they built. They don't just have jobs; they have institutional legacy. They know their community. They survived the seasons. The worst of times. The loss of life. The hope in new ones. They’ve been through it all. And in many cases, they’ve done it together with their fellow teammates through the years.
This past May, my oldest child turned 20. She inherited the version of me that was still collecting logos, still chasing rare jobs in tall grass. She saw every evolution I skipped trying to catch the next thing. I can't get those years back. So when I held my newborn daughter days later that same month, I realized: she doesn't need a collector. She needs a nurturer. A protector. The evolved father. The father who doesn’t float from place to place. The father who planted a tree and watered it every single day until it gave me and my children fruit and shade.
Arkansas is where I have decided to plant that tree. I’m looking at the ground beneath my feet, at the community standing next to me, and at the daughter who is depending on me to stay put. It took two decades to build a facade, now let’s see what it takes to build a legacy.
