I’m having real difficulty writing this series of posts. Anyone would think I found the idea of change a bit challenging…..
As far as work was concerned, I had got a bit institutionalised and because of this I found it very difficult to imagine how things could be different. Oh, sure, I had friends who changed jobs every so often, friends who worked part time, friends who didn’t work at all, and I could see that those ways of living worked perfectly for them, but I couldn’t see how they would work for me. My job was quite specialised, so I found it difficult to imagine how I could work anywhere else. The company was not exactly open to the idea of flexible or part-time working, and in any case, it wasn’t something I was thinking about. Oh, sure, work had downsides, but on the whole I enjoyed it.
When circumstances changed and I found myself in a working life which I no longer enjoyed, my attitude changed in a number of ways. Most importantly, I stopped seeing work as the natural order of things. When I hated the job I wanted nothing so much as not to have to go in every day, and kept thinking of how many more agreeable ways there were to fill my time. Even now I’ve started liking work again, the feeling persists that life would be more enjoyable if I didn’t have to work every single one of the 220 working days a year which are left after you subtract weekends and holidays.
Secondly, as I’ve mentioned, the negative things about work which I had previously taken for granted have started to grate more and more. The journey, for instance. It’s awful, and even on a good week it takes up about ten hours, the equivalent of one and a half working days. It seems nonsensical that I have to keep doing this every single day. And other things irritate too. Boring days seem more boring when I’m acutely aware of the other things I could be doing with my time.
More tomorrow.