I don't know quite what I expected to feel on leaving work. I thought I would be a bit sad perhaps, to leave my colleagues behind. I thought I would be excited about the new life ahead. I thought it would feel odd. And if I am honest I probably had not thought about it too much, feeling that I couldn't really second guess how I would feel and that the important thing had been to decide that this was what I wanted to do. Heaven knows, making my mind up was hard enough to do!
The last day was strange, clearing out my desk, throwing armfuls of paper into the confidential waste and rescuing a couple of articles I had written for technical journals. I don't think I will need them but my memory is so sieve-like that I won't be able to remember who published them without a copy. It felt like the slenderest of insurance policies, throwing away years of notes and journals and presentations and hanging onto two publications, too small a legacy for twenty years of professional life. I handed in my laptop and my blackberry, feeling strangely naked. My handbag felt too light and I felt like a balloon, floating free, with that same slight sadness I feel when I see a balloon let go, floating up in the sky, gone, out of reach.
We had farewell drinks. We all said we would keep in touch but there is only one person who has become such a friend that I know that I will see continue to see her. It felt an oddly anticlimactic thing, slipping out of the door without a real fanfare or farewell. That was my fault really. I had inadvertently arranged my farewell when my boss and some of my senior colleagues were away at a conference and I didn't want to come back again just for a send off so I didn't reschedule it. Part of me just wanted to get on with it.
Last week hardly felt any different. I don't normally work on Friday so it was really just Thursday, usually a working from home day, when I had additional time. I sorted papers for the cottage, tidied my handbag, sowed sweetpeas by the dozen, took my work suits to the dry cleaners. It could have been just an extra day's holiday although there was no Thursday morning conference call. I looked out of the window a bit, wondering what to do. I walked round the garden.
I knew that today would be the day when it really hit home. Today I normally get up, pack my bag, check my diary, make a call or two and drive to the station to catch the train to London. Today I got up at about a quarter to eight, only half an hour later than usual. I thought I would drift if I stayed at home so I went to yoga and relished the sense of a second class in a week, my body suddenly surprising me by a rightness to a posture that I had not realised was lacking, tightness relaxing, sinews stretching. My tight hamstrings still make touching my toes a distant dream but it was good to give myself fully to something, letting the distractions go, focussing on the body so fully that the mind quietens.
I am torn now between a sense that I should work frantically through the masses of things to do which I have been putting on various lists for weeks and thinking that I should take my time. There is always tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. Too much rushing about will prevent whatever it is that I want to give room for from emerging. Sorry if that sounds too new-agey but that is how it feels, although I am a boringly practical person. But too much solitude and lassitude will not be good for me either. I know I am someone who needs people to fire off as well as time to myself. I am also someone who has had a lifetime of responding to deadlines, of working best under pressure, of whizzing around on an adrenalin high which I have been slowly weaning myself from over these last couple of years.
So today I am going to live in the day, quiet and still with a pale grey sky and some Spring warmth in the air. I have my Offa's Dyke walk in a few weeks' time to give me a focus and something to plan for so I am not going totally cold turkey. I have counted out the seed potatoes and watered in the greenhouse and there is a suspicious cat related stain to clean from under the dresser. There is Welsh class tonight and boiler services to be arranged and the cottage accounts to do.
I think I might start with the suspicious stain. Doesn't do to get too excited too soon.
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Friday, 20 March 2009
Time for myself
I am now speeding towards leaving work like a train towards the buffers. Last week I had my farewell meal in Manchester, a great meal in the Yang Sing, a fabulous Chinese restuarant. I looked round at all these people I have worked with for the last nine years and thought how very much I like them. Will I miss them? Well I hardly ever see them even now, we are all so busy chasing our own tails at work.
Everyone wants to know what I will do and it is clear again, as in so many conversations with colleagues, that people are torn between envy and disbelief at the idea of walking away. It also is much easier for them to understand the idea that I might lecture or take on some non executive jobs than that I might just do things with no profile, no clout, no money. These are my work friends, lovely interesting people, too busy to organise a wedding, too frantic at work to spend enough time slowly recovering after an injury falling from a horse. I was just as utterly work focussed for so long. It is extraordinary how completely that has changed. I don't feel like a different person and yet here I am making different choices. Weird, I don't understand it really, it is just necessary.
And tomorrow is the last day in London. I feel very strange tonight, a little queasy, a little wobbly, as if my body is determined to tell me that this a big thing I am doing, however hard I try to tell my head that I have thought about this, planned it, decided it and that I know this is the right thing for me.
Very early start tomorrow and the last train journey. Here we go.
Everyone wants to know what I will do and it is clear again, as in so many conversations with colleagues, that people are torn between envy and disbelief at the idea of walking away. It also is much easier for them to understand the idea that I might lecture or take on some non executive jobs than that I might just do things with no profile, no clout, no money. These are my work friends, lovely interesting people, too busy to organise a wedding, too frantic at work to spend enough time slowly recovering after an injury falling from a horse. I was just as utterly work focussed for so long. It is extraordinary how completely that has changed. I don't feel like a different person and yet here I am making different choices. Weird, I don't understand it really, it is just necessary.
And tomorrow is the last day in London. I feel very strange tonight, a little queasy, a little wobbly, as if my body is determined to tell me that this a big thing I am doing, however hard I try to tell my head that I have thought about this, planned it, decided it and that I know this is the right thing for me.
Very early start tomorrow and the last train journey. Here we go.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Onwards and upwards and downwards
Giving up my job feels like a big deal. It feels right and ready and proper but it also feels like something that should be marked, celebrated, acknowledged. They don't seem to do cheesy Hallmark cards. Congratulations on turning your back on your successful career. Another door opens, complete with soft focus sunrise. I decided quite a bit ago that I would mark it by doing something which I could not have done over the last thirty years when children and work made their due claims on my time. I am going to walk the Offa's Dyke long distance path.
We live about twenty minutes walk away from the path, twelve miles or so from its Northern end. Ever since we got here the sense that it is just up there, running away south and north down the ridge along the length of Wales, has called out to me. My brother lives about ten minutes away from the path too, right down at the southern end in Chepstow. I love the idea that you could just get up there and start walking and find yourself at the other end of the country.
So at the end of May a friend and I are going to walk it. There has never been a time when I could absent myself from my normal life to do something like this (and it is worth pointing out that even now it does require Ian to be prepared to feed cats and chickens and take care of the house which he has said he will do and someone else to look after my grandson for a couple of Mondays, I am not totally dispensable). I am not totally unfit but I am not extremely fit either and my normal life does not ask me to walk for ten miles or so every day for two or three weeks. I am sure that to your fell running, marathon completing, three peaks challenge types the 177 miles of walking is a mere bagatelle, but to me it is faintly daunting. It needs planning and preparation. I am both sure I can do it and slightly scared. I go onto websites dedicated to walking the path and find hyper competitive men boasting about doing the walk in five days and I think that they will just have to budge over and let us middle aged women in. We will be walking quite slowly and we don't mind stepping to the side of the path as they come powering through but sometimes they will just have to fume silently while we huff and puff up the steep narrow bits. Tough. It's my world too.
So today I had a bit of a panic about the imminence of the walk and my total unpreparedness. I rushed through a morning of work, suddenly made frantic as people realise I am really going and if they want me to finish things there is not much time. Then a speedy drive to Denbigh and a whizz round the supermarket (I know, not small scale, not good, but at least not Tescos) and this afternoon I set off up the hill.
It is odd to walk alone when you are not used to it. There is no distraction in the form of conversation. For a moment it feels strange and lonely and then slowly you settle to it. The trees are still bare but catkins hang from the hazels. The sun is pale and the sky is clear and blue above the ridge. Tiny lambs have appeared in the fields, impossibly small and wobbly on their feet. Even so small they really do run and leap and gambol like a children's picture book, a tangle of legs and tails and bounce. Abruptly as I climb there are no lambs, just heavily pregnant ewes heaving themselves to their feet at my approach. It doesn't take much, just a few metres higher up the hill, but here they are not ready. It is too windy, too high, a couple of weeks further behind on the march towards spring.
Over the high hill the path snakes downwards through woods and fields towards the distant village. The wind blows in my face but there is warmth in the sun. I see no one for an hour or so and then an old farmer moving slowly away across the fields, tweed jacket, cap, two sheepdogs at his heels. A hand painted sign is nailed crookedly to a tree at the side of the path: "Stray dogs on this land will be shot". This is old country: no Barbours, no Shaker kitchens, no shiny 4 by 4s. It is beautiful up here but a hard life. I pass a farmhouse falling back into the earth, slate roof long since taken or blown away, stone walls collapsing, grass growing round the hearth.
Further down there are places which have not been deserted and the path skirts a field up close against a farm which is occupied and cared for. Again there are lambs and ewes. Over the wall in the sunshine a pair of twin lambs are so new their coats are wet and plastered smooth to their sides. They are so close and so small I could almost reach over and put them in my pocket. One stands wobbling against its mother, trying to push for milk. The other, newer one is lying on the grass, still bloody, the mother licking at it. Beside them the afterbirth lies darkly red against the new green of the grass. I am always astonished, every year, by how beautiful lambs are. Sheep are not beautiful, but lambs are fantastically, unfeasibly perfectly beautiful, almost too sweet to be true and yet not a marketing construct, not an overblown illustration, not a piece of foolish sentimentality. This is just what they look like, as perfect and as fleeting as a swallow or a butterfly.
It takes me two and a half hours to walk over the hill, down to the village that I have only previously visited by road, and back up the hill and home again. In places it is steep and hard, I grow warm and out of breath but recover accpetably enough when the path eases again.
I arrive home heartened. One walk is just a start, but maybe I can do it if I practise enough, a rite of passage.
We live about twenty minutes walk away from the path, twelve miles or so from its Northern end. Ever since we got here the sense that it is just up there, running away south and north down the ridge along the length of Wales, has called out to me. My brother lives about ten minutes away from the path too, right down at the southern end in Chepstow. I love the idea that you could just get up there and start walking and find yourself at the other end of the country.
So at the end of May a friend and I are going to walk it. There has never been a time when I could absent myself from my normal life to do something like this (and it is worth pointing out that even now it does require Ian to be prepared to feed cats and chickens and take care of the house which he has said he will do and someone else to look after my grandson for a couple of Mondays, I am not totally dispensable). I am not totally unfit but I am not extremely fit either and my normal life does not ask me to walk for ten miles or so every day for two or three weeks. I am sure that to your fell running, marathon completing, three peaks challenge types the 177 miles of walking is a mere bagatelle, but to me it is faintly daunting. It needs planning and preparation. I am both sure I can do it and slightly scared. I go onto websites dedicated to walking the path and find hyper competitive men boasting about doing the walk in five days and I think that they will just have to budge over and let us middle aged women in. We will be walking quite slowly and we don't mind stepping to the side of the path as they come powering through but sometimes they will just have to fume silently while we huff and puff up the steep narrow bits. Tough. It's my world too.
So today I had a bit of a panic about the imminence of the walk and my total unpreparedness. I rushed through a morning of work, suddenly made frantic as people realise I am really going and if they want me to finish things there is not much time. Then a speedy drive to Denbigh and a whizz round the supermarket (I know, not small scale, not good, but at least not Tescos) and this afternoon I set off up the hill.
It is odd to walk alone when you are not used to it. There is no distraction in the form of conversation. For a moment it feels strange and lonely and then slowly you settle to it. The trees are still bare but catkins hang from the hazels. The sun is pale and the sky is clear and blue above the ridge. Tiny lambs have appeared in the fields, impossibly small and wobbly on their feet. Even so small they really do run and leap and gambol like a children's picture book, a tangle of legs and tails and bounce. Abruptly as I climb there are no lambs, just heavily pregnant ewes heaving themselves to their feet at my approach. It doesn't take much, just a few metres higher up the hill, but here they are not ready. It is too windy, too high, a couple of weeks further behind on the march towards spring.
Over the high hill the path snakes downwards through woods and fields towards the distant village. The wind blows in my face but there is warmth in the sun. I see no one for an hour or so and then an old farmer moving slowly away across the fields, tweed jacket, cap, two sheepdogs at his heels. A hand painted sign is nailed crookedly to a tree at the side of the path: "Stray dogs on this land will be shot". This is old country: no Barbours, no Shaker kitchens, no shiny 4 by 4s. It is beautiful up here but a hard life. I pass a farmhouse falling back into the earth, slate roof long since taken or blown away, stone walls collapsing, grass growing round the hearth.
Further down there are places which have not been deserted and the path skirts a field up close against a farm which is occupied and cared for. Again there are lambs and ewes. Over the wall in the sunshine a pair of twin lambs are so new their coats are wet and plastered smooth to their sides. They are so close and so small I could almost reach over and put them in my pocket. One stands wobbling against its mother, trying to push for milk. The other, newer one is lying on the grass, still bloody, the mother licking at it. Beside them the afterbirth lies darkly red against the new green of the grass. I am always astonished, every year, by how beautiful lambs are. Sheep are not beautiful, but lambs are fantastically, unfeasibly perfectly beautiful, almost too sweet to be true and yet not a marketing construct, not an overblown illustration, not a piece of foolish sentimentality. This is just what they look like, as perfect and as fleeting as a swallow or a butterfly.
It takes me two and a half hours to walk over the hill, down to the village that I have only previously visited by road, and back up the hill and home again. In places it is steep and hard, I grow warm and out of breath but recover accpetably enough when the path eases again.
I arrive home heartened. One walk is just a start, but maybe I can do it if I practise enough, a rite of passage.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)