You can get laid off on a Monday. On an unassuming Monday morning, I joined a fifteen minute video call with two strangers titled "Important company update." One stranger immediately read off a prepared termination spiel while the other confirmed my personal email address was up-to-date in the corporate payroll system.

Yes, I told her. I double-checked the corporate payroll system right before the meeting because, well, I understood the implications of a fifteen minute video call with two strangers titled "Important company update." She seemed embarrassed that none of this was a surprise.

The fifteen minute meeting was over in less than ten. They gave me some time back.

I was cut loose from my job. It was over. A decade's worth of industry jargon, day-to-day responsibilities, organizational processes, operational dashboards, microservice names, and accumulating anxieties no longer had any bearing on my life, besides constituting new lines to write on my resume.

I shut the company-owned laptop, stepped away from my desk, took a seat on the couch next to my cat, and cracked open my copy of Lonesome Dove.

The first hundred pages of Lonesome Dove introduce us readers to Call and Gus, two former Texas Rangers whose days of gunslinging are behind them. They scrape a living as cattlemen in the sleepiest, tiniest town in Texas. Days on their ranch are familiar and monotonous and simple. Neither modern nor anachronistic measures would judge their lives as particularly easy, yet their lives have become the sum total of making easy choices, year after year.

Life in Lonesome Dove (the town) felt very relatable to me. The seasons passed at the Hat Creek Cattle Company as the seasons had passed on the Business Intelligence and Reporting Team. Their Sisyphean well-digging project was that one ETL pipeline optimization task that never moved off my Kanban board. Their cross-border rustling raids into Mexico under the cover of darkness were those late-night system failures that required my resentful, groggy attention.

The story progresses and we learn more about these two men. Call is introverted, stolid, and finds more solace in the sunset than he does material comforts. Gus flees behind his wit or into a jug of whiskey when presented with any minor inconvenience. Other characters revere the pair as legends, but we don't see much of that legendary stuff in the first hundred pages of the book. In fact, the only hint that something legendary might yet happen to Call and Gus is the 850 or so pages waiting behind the first hundred.

Then, it does happen. A catalyst (or two) appears and unleashes the tension inside the old Rangers. They pack up the ranch and bid adieu to their familiar lives and make for Montana. The story really begins.

There was a welcome comfort in the page-turning adventures of fictional cowboys. Their problems felt more real than my own; their problems were certainly more satisfying to imagine. And, somewhat unexpectedly, their challenges felt very relatable.

Listen. I'm no cowboy. I've got hands that glide on a keyboard but would recoil at the abrasive touch of a horsehair lasso. Four hours trotting atop the tamest mare would turn my lower back into charred beefsteak and have me laid up on the couch for a month. I mean, I can run and hike and occasionally saw logs and carry boxes and dig holes but, really, I'm no cowboy.

I do know what it's like to make easy choices. I know what it's like to feel totally uninspired. I know what it's like to judge my present situation as totally inadequate and small and familiar, and yet choose that life, day after day. Like Call, I know what it's like to relish being the quiet loner. Like Gus, I know what it's like to shut myself off behind an unserious attitude. Like both, I know what it's like to believe your best days are behind you.

I'm no cowboy, but even cowboys go through this shit.

It's hardly a perfect metaphor. Call and Gus ultimately made the decision to pack up their wagon and leave the eponymous town. They were moved to action by a well-timed opportunity and series of circumstances that ignited their simmering restlessness. Nobody gave them a pink slip and a virtual handshake. Nobody put a gun to their head (at least, not at that point in the story).

There are other characters in Lonesome Dove, though, and not everyone is a go-getter.

Midway through the book, a small-town sheriff from Arkansas named July Johnson begins a fraught and lonely journey westward to arrest one of the Hat Creek cowboys. He does this begrudgingly. His own circumstances start with a stray bullet and take him way, way further from home than he ever bargained for.

Let's just leave it there. I'm doing my best to avoid spoilers. Hell, maybe I can convince you to read Lonesome Dove for yourself.

Suffice it to say I can relate my employment situation more directly to July's arc than to the adventures of Call and Gus. Sometimes you can change your circumstances of your own volition and sometimes you have to be nudged. Considerably nudged.

But once you're underway, the frontier is the frontier. The sheriff's triumphs are no less outstanding and his tragedies are no less heartbreaking than the ones that befall the cattle-driving cowboys. Everyone must ride, day after day, whether they choose to be there or not.

I finished Lonesome Dove a week after I was laid off. That's no small feat, given the book is long and dense and heart-wrenching at times. I'm also a slow and tedious reader. On more than one occasion I had to put the book down for a while to process what I'd just read.

It's a story full of people doing hard things. It's a story about setting upon a frontier of both natural and man-made horrors. The journey across the frontier changes you; by the end, you may not recognize the person who decided to make the journey in the first place. It's a story about the will to do hard things, some chosen and some not.

I am also on a journey now.

Ten years have passed since the last time I changed jobs. I am older and I feel older. There's an entire miserable legion of unemployed software developers like me looking for a gig– some of them laid off months ago and still posting on LinkedIn about it. The overlap between my expertise and the batch of hiring employers I would work for in good conscience feels like the thinnest sliver of a crescent moon hanging over my head.

There will be interviews, technical assessments, chats over coffee, awkward reaching-out to people I haven't spoken to in years, and so, so much rejection in the coming weeks and months. This is the journey. Turning back is not an option, nor is staying put. Cautious pessimism can be as deadly as naive optimism.

All I can do is move forward, leading the cowboy inside me across the frontier to find greener pastures. They're out there.