Well, here I am, back again after quite a break. These have been difficult times for me in many ways and I am quite sure I am not out of the woods yet. Difficult but perhaps also ultimately important and rewarding times of transition. Who knows? I guess I'll just have to wait and see. What I had thought I would be doing with my life professionally has fairly definitively ground to a halt and proved to be something of a dead end, rather than the highway to glory and satisfaction! This is distressing, unsettling, challenging and liberating news for someone in (as it was described to me) "early middle age" (!!) So I have been going through (and continue to go through) a slow process of rebuilding: how can I adapt the skills I have? Do I need to start all over again? What really interests me?, as well as encountering a few of the recognised stages of denial about it all: anger, hurt, blame, jealousy etc. Perhaps these are not the official recognised stages of denial, but they're the ones I've been feeling.
What prompted me especially to post is a post I've just read from a blogging friend of mine at Another Beautiful Day (http://milk-and-berries.blogspot.com/). In her latest entry, she ponders the nature of youth and this is what I have been thinking about lately too. How full of promise life seems when you're young! Everything seems possible, time and opportunity stretch out before you. What I now think is really amazing is to recapture at least some of that feeling later, when you've taken a few knocks, while also balancing it out with a useful dash of 30-something reality. Can it be done? I'll let you know. Meanwhile, I think Roddy Frame (he of 80s indie-pop group Aztec Camera, ironically part of the soundtrack of my youth) says it best in "Western Skies":
The road you chose to follow
Slowly turned into a cul-de-sac.
There's no shame in turning back
And trying something new.
What prompted me especially to post is a post I've just read from a blogging friend of mine at Another Beautiful Day (http://milk-and-berries.blogspot.com/). In her latest entry, she ponders the nature of youth and this is what I have been thinking about lately too. How full of promise life seems when you're young! Everything seems possible, time and opportunity stretch out before you. What I now think is really amazing is to recapture at least some of that feeling later, when you've taken a few knocks, while also balancing it out with a useful dash of 30-something reality. Can it be done? I'll let you know. Meanwhile, I think Roddy Frame (he of 80s indie-pop group Aztec Camera, ironically part of the soundtrack of my youth) says it best in "Western Skies":
The road you chose to follow
Slowly turned into a cul-de-sac.
There's no shame in turning back
And trying something new.
