The Big Pause

 

I gotta be honest here. I was in a supervisors Teams meeting today, and I told them I volunteer to work from home for the next 9 years until I retire. I’m kind of loving it and kind of dreading going back to work, to “the grind”. For reals.

In our lives, we all make choices. When I moved back to my home town, over 20 years ago, I made a conscious decision to work in the public sector. Less money, more freedom, better benefits, more stability, better chance of getting to “be there” for my children as they grew up. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like had we chosen differently, but in general, I am okay with this choice. Right now, I feel a tremendous amount of privilege also. I’m still getting paid. I am “working from home”…still accomplishing what I need to, and also having a tremendous amount of freedom once those things are done. Not having to fill the hours between 7am-4pm EVERY DAY at a place that isn’t my house. I like this.

I just realized that I never posted this. I don’t remember now when I wrote it. Likely…..mid-April? May?

I spent a quiet birthday this year. 52!! Completed a major project. We have a room that was my son’s when he was a teen. It had become our “closet room” several years ago, which most recently had translated in to “throw stuff here when we don’t know what else to do with it, we’ll deal with it later”. Something else that had been very clear in my life is that I literally pay for the house we all live in, and yet, *I*, in particular, had absolutely no personal space to call my own, where I have my own things and where my stuff could BE. The first challenge was clearing out a whole bunch of stuff, which happened, then creating my space. It came out SO GOOD and now I type to you from this space.

I think as things continue to “normalize”, I hope that more people are able to acknowledge and realize that this sort of “reset” was absolutely needed on so very many levels. I think this is enough for this entry, let’s publish!

Peace!