Taking Stock
Well it won’t be long before everyone is reflecting on another year gone by and thinking about how they are going to begin 2011. There will be those top ten lists of 2010, the best and worst of 2010. New Year’s resolutions and of course the preachy posts about not making New Year’s resolutions at all, but instead some "deep" insight about focusing on your whole life, not just the new year!
So I’m getting in early and getting it over with. Really as I age I am becoming less inclined to dwell on nostalgia and view every day as important as the next or last. There is just as much significance in life whether there is something sensational to report in the news or nothing at all, so I’m going to do my little bit of reflection right here, right now about how I have got this far and I’m even going to go as far as to serialize it (so I can have something to write about for a bit, even if it is about me).
OK then, on with Leave the Office – My first ever blog and after all this time, thinking of ways for Leave the Office to grow up and become an authority on something I decided to forget about all that and just write. I have other blogs and interests, which are based around my true passions in life: Writing and recording music, but this is what started me off on a new life, so it’s about the unfolding of life for me and how I stumble through it with varying degrees of success and lessons learned – if that is of any interest to you that is!
Still, after learning many lessons and meeting with new lessons every day I have come to a point where I no longer feel worried about whether I sound self obsessed writing about myself. If you’re not interested you won’t even have got this far down the page.
Leave the Office took me from a place of Longing to Living. It was gradual, but that was good because it gave me no choice but to watch what was happening in my life and come to terms with periods of time where I wasn’t enjoying myself so much. That was key for me, to actually understand the fact that it is normal to have periods in life that are less than desirable because they give rise to your creative thinking to come up with suggestions for a solution.
My suggestion was to start a new life on the other side of the world – just start again using everything I had built up to that point (as in my knowledge and experience) and try to put the best of it to good use, whilst dropping the less useful part of my nature (i.e. the stroppy, impatient, angry SOB I was susceptible to being all too often).
I pushed myself until I broke out of certain patterns and developed new ones that were less self-focused and more enjoyable and finally in 2008 I left the Office!
