It is hard to comprehend the sudden violence of a Chicago thunderstorm until you have experienced one in person. As you wander among the skyscrapers on a stifling summer day, the sky darkens and the songbirds fall silent. Raindrops tap your shoulder. Within seconds, drips become torrents, wind-flung grit stings exposed skin, car alarms erupt into fits of bewildered honking, and sheets of rain land repeated body blows.

Recent events in my personal and professional life have felt a lot like the onslaught of a thunderstorm. It started when I lost months of work in an improbable string of computer breakdowns. Then my dog died. Then, just as this mounting misfortune was starting to wear me down, my partner of seven years was diagnosed with a life-changing illness.

The darkest clouds have cleared now, but I am still lost in a haze of uncertainty. My partner's health is great at the moment, but it could slide downhill at any time. We both want to respond to this metaphorical lightning strike in the best way possible — work less, appreciate what we have, spend more time actively enjoying life — but it is hard to restructure two busy working lives around capricious contingencies.

I am trying to spend fewer late nights at the office and fewer weekends chained to my laptop, but my bottomless to-do list exerts a powerful force. The diagnosis has made us want to move closer to family, to take travel plans off the back burner and to spend more time cooking, dancing, camping — but not at the expense of the rewarding professional lives we've worked so hard to build.

I don't yet know how to balance these demands, and I can't predict how they might affect the next fork in my career path. For now, the best I can do is to grope my way forward, with the knowledge that even the heaviest Midwestern downpours are soon dispersed by sunlight.