The Beginning of Change

I really think my thinking started to change in 2001, a turning point year for everyone. It began when I walked out of the company where I was working on May 30. I didn't realize at the time I would never return to that job. I was scheduled for hand surgery and the recoup was long, but I didn't know at that point that before all was said and done, while I was recouperating, the company would eliminate my position, and after 9/11, I would need surgery on the other hand.... I was unsure of my future and felt very alone. I'm certain I was not by myself that year in this thinking. Others were going through the same thing for all sorts of different reasons.

I hadn't realized how much working had structured my life. I had worked since before college, just a dinky kind of summer job, but then in college, I was a professor's secretary, and then, well, I just kept working year and year....until May 30, 2001, when it just stopped. I'd often thought what it would be like to have total free time, what a dream.


I was soon to find out that sometimes what we wish for really isn't as idyllic as we may think it is going to be. Although I felt tired of the grind, when it stopped, I felt cut off. Like a family that lives for their kids and then the kids leave home, and then what? Well, I guess I was living through my jobs over so many years. And my free time was just finge time. Now it was all time... And I was being forced to spend a lot of time with someone I really didn't know...ME.

Years ago, Uria Heap had a song "Look into the Mirror". I always liked that one, and that is what I was starting to do. The deal with so much free time is that you think more about stuff that you don't think about when you are consumed by a job. You start thinking about who you really are, what purpose you really have and how you might just alter what you have always been to better yourself and the world. Frankly, I'd never given any of that much thought while I was working. But now I felt the need. And I realized that the way I had been living was causing drama and stress - self-inflicted - and I wanted to rid myself of it and start living a more tranquil life.

How to get there was the problem.