I don’t have another job and I don’t have a plan to look for one for at least a month.

I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

I didn’t know I could be this brave.

I never knew I would follow my heart and still make a considered decision.

I remember saying to a friend of mine I was just whingeing, that this was a first world problem and I should suck it up and keep turning up.

Except I couldn’t.

It took me two months to decide and two weeks of coming to work and making my job the best job in the world, to be sure the way I felt wasn’t coming from something else in my life.

It wasn’t.

Without realising it, I’d outgrown my job.

For so long my job filled a need in me to be needed. I adored being the go to girl who solved my clients’ issues, who my staff needed for direction. It validated I was worthwhile and Ok and I had some power and control. It was validating who I wanted to be. Except along the way I became who I actually am and external validation stopped mattering.

I figured I was enough. And the qualities I’d wanted my job to mirror weren’t really me at all. I didn’t need to be needed anymore.

And I felt relief.

I’ll be back in my corporate world again in a few months but it will be a very different experience. I feel like it’ll be about the processes and not the client relationships. I’ll be able to play to my skills instead of feeling I need to prove myself in areas that aren’t who I am.

At last.

I’m smiling. Anything is possible.

So I’ve five more weeks and then I’ve a passport and a Nikon and a world map….

Radioactive Imagine Dragons

After writing a few hundred words for my blog today, I trashed it all.

Some times, no matter how hard I try, my feelings are too elusive for words.

And I love that. It makes me smile. It makes me human.

Love comes and goes.  Xavier Rudd.

It’s not the most uplifting of songs for a day I’m all about tears and letting go of things, but these are such beautiful lyrics…. :)

Some days I want to lie in the sun and not move. There’s something so beautiful about stretching my body against the sand or grass – connecting with the same cells I’m made of.

Music does the same thing to me. There are songs that make my atoms sing – pun totally intended ;)

This song is one of those. I can’t stop listening to it, I’m lost in the lyrics. Sigh….

Passenger. Let her go.

Today I’m especially grateful. I’m grateful for speaking to someone today who inadvertently showed me what I no longer believed. She clarified for me, without even meaning to, what I had left behind. Isn’t it beautiful, how the most unexpected interactions can show us the most pain but ultimately provide the greatest expansion?

I’m still living and breathing, it’s all golden (I love the book the Outsiders) and even though it sucked and I was furious and wanted to cry, I wouldn’t trade that conversation for anything.

This life… it makes me sigh sometimes with its wisdom.

Passenger – Hearts on Fire (with Ed Sheeran) - how beautiful is this?

* Uh oh another iphone photo, my Nikon is out of action :(

Because some days don’t need any words, just feelings :)

Winter Winds Mumford and Sons, lyrics to fall in love with, pure poetry, ‘let the memories be good for those who stay..’

*It’s another iphone 3 photo but it’s all I had  to photograph with at the time.

What I do deals with issues that aren’t the end of the world but everyone thinks are.  I think this ‘end of world feeling’ is simply because people don’t like anything impinging on a comfortable working life. Anything which makes the 9-5 hard seems to stretch many people to snapping.

Yet discomfort in the workplace is just as valid a tool for making changes in the workplace, as it is in life . The only difference seems to be in life we kind of expect to be uncomfortable and (hopefully) we learn to hang out with it for a bit. At work not so much.

In the corporate world management hierarchy gives people a false sense of comfort. You can always try to hand the discomfort to someone else; try to forget it’s your discomfort and it’s happening to you. I witnessed this recently and it reminded me so much of how humans in their struggle to not be uncomfortable, perpetuate the discomfort.  No one took ownership until three months later someone finally owned their discomfort. And shock horror there was a truly positive outcome. Yet it could have been sorted  much sooner with a bit of acceptance things were uncomfortable.

It’s easy to be comfortable but I’m learning slowly (well it is Jane world) the more we accept discomfort the less it lasts for. Today I was singing away (to the Gaslight Anthem in case anyone cares) cleaning my house, really happy and then something made me think of my grandma’s scone recipe and I started crying because I miss her. So I cried and then on my day went. So I go there and it’s not easy but even acknowledging it’s not easy is a step to getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter if it’s at work or with your mates, discomfort is there to be sunk into as easily as comfort. I think that’s a graceful thing. There’s fluidity in the movement between comfort and discomfort if we allow it.

I’ve listened this song a bit lately, I’ve loved it for so long,  and I know someone called Ben who might think it’s because of him but it’s not, lovely as he is. Simple Ben. The Brian Cadd, Lior, Old Man River and Mike Rudd  version because I’ve seen these guys perform it live.

* This is an iphone photo and I have old iphone 3 – but I like the feeling it conveys, if not the quality :)

This is a photo like that – a seahorse suspended in green and blue.

This is an award-winning macro photo by Nicholas Samaras for a very good reason but even without an award I love it.

It’s another world of sunlight and indigo and suspended gravity. It looks so fragile, this captured moment in time.

From the series Our world underwater 2013.

I have loved this song forever.. and this is the version I first heard.

Tomorrow Wendy

This is about a real woman diagnosed with AIDS decades ago. Rather than live out what she saw as a death sentence she made a very personal and heart breaking choice, about which none of us can have judgement, well I can’t anyway.

I find this song haunting, it’s these lyrics:

Only God says “jump”
So I say “in good time”
Cause if he ever saw it
It was through these eyes of mine
And if he ever suffered
It was me who did his crying

Ahh who am I kidding? It’s every line in the song that gets me and it probably always will :)

Speaking of amazing creativity.. I love this :)

I want to meet the mind who thought this would be worth doing.  I bet it was a leap of faith for everyone until it was rehearsed for the first time under lights.

Courtesy of the quirky posting saarimner

Shadow dance