When I was first laid off last year it took awhile for the panic to set in. I had been given a ‘working termination’ so I had 3 months with pay that included the opportunity to work with my employer to find employment at the university. I met with HR, talked to them, took the re-employment workshop, re-worked my resume and avidly applied myself to finding work asap.
I went for quite a few interviews and remained ever hopeful that I would quickly find a new home. Well, as it turns out, this wasn’t quite meant to be and 7 months later I am still looking for work.
There was a period of time, and a fairly long one at that, that I went through a feeling of complete terror at what was happening and not happening in my life. It corresponded at the same time with my mom being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The sicker she got the more desperate I was to find a job. Dave said to me one day, “be careful what you wish for” and he was right. As my mom’s illness progressed I started to let go of my panic realizing that trying to work at a stressful job 3,000 kilometres away from my mom would be devastating for her and for me.
While I continued to keep my eye out for work I started to allow myself to seize the day. And for me that meant spending as much time with my mom and my family as possible.
I am still looking for a good home but in the mean time, the idea of ‘seizing the day’ which I learned during this difficult period is now spilling over into my life without my mom. A friend called the other day and asked how I spent my days. I laughed and said that I had developed wonderful rituals around the many ways I have learned to relax. It’s odd but once you let yourself just be you can unfold into the universe in a very beautiful kind of way. I feel my creative self returning, I have a new appreciation for things like flowers. I bought bulbs in the fall (garlic and tulip) and planted them. Every day I stand outside and look at them and am shocked at how crazy it is that you just drop these things in soil, stand back and do absolutely nothing and then boom, there they are peeking their heads up. Sometimes I find myself rooting around in the dirt, ”Where are you, you little devil? I’m just saying good morning.” As I gear up to enter work life again I’m going to remember this moment, to just take it as it comes. To seize the day, the moment, the hour.
This has been a message from the “glass half full brigade”.
Condofire 