Revelations

Why hello again, it's your fidgety itchy-footed friend with another insomniac message. I'm going to start with a bang of a statement and say that the past six months have been some of the most enlightening months of the 479 I've lived so far. Whoppah!

No, I haven't experienced a religious stirring nor have I trancsended to a higher level of consciousness. Rather it all started with a near nervous breakdown soon after my previous post. Without going into too much detail, I found myself in quite a muddle with my many, many, many thoughts and with stress levels flying off into the great unknown. And before I could say "bonkers" I found myself sitting in a comfortable chair, in front of a very understanding lady, grasping a tissue in one hand and a cheque in the other... Welcome to the world of therapy.  

It seems that I had a LOT to say, and after several months of talking about myself (and with the risk of sounding self absorbed, it's been wonderful to just focus on the Number One guilt-free with no need for reciprocity!) I realised two simple but somewhat life-changing things. First was what kind of a person I really am, quickly followed by the logical conclusion that I am not where I want to be.

Well, what can I say. I won't go into much detail about my existential discovery... May I offer you some wanderlust with a sprinkle of  melancholy, followed by sweet impatience laden with a generous helping of dark humour? No? Well, that's what you're getting. I am what I am, and I'm good with it.

So, I realised I can't change who I am; I can only modify my behaviour. And that, my friends, is when I eventually found where I want to be. Oh yes. 

It started with a plan to live part of the year away from London and the UK. I thought that what I need was physical and geographical space, and planned to work remotely from Finland a few months over the next year. What a liberating though to someone like me, for whom staying put can be a major struggle! Yes, I thought, that is me. On the go, free, emancipated from the confines of the rat race. But as I looked deeper into the practicalities of working remotely I noticed that my plans didn't really include any of the work bit. Curious, eh? So with that realisation came the question why my work wasn't featuring in any of these plans I'd been making, and the answer came to me like a bolt of lightning: I don't actually like what I do! Be it in Finland or the UK. This then led me to ask myself what it is that I do want to do, and to my surprise all I could tink about was language, speech, social work, caring, helping. Not fly, leave, travel, explore. Wow, I wasn't expecting that! With quite a bit of further digging and research I have come to apply to university to do a postgraduate diploma in Speech and Language Therapy. It is something I had thought of before but didn't think I would be able to do due to a) it bein indulgent, having a Masters degree already, b) being old (or "mature" as they say rather kindly in all the prospectuses ...ha! Little do they know...) and c) well, it just didn't occur to me that I could do it. Everything I've done, my persona, my life experience, my interests, everything has pointed to this one obvious thing I should do. There have been so many signs, and I've just not seen them. What waste! Like throwing a frisbee to a blind dog.

Phew. Enough. Now you know. Now I know. It's off my chest. Perhaps in the next blog text I will talk about the actual plans and what I am doing to make this dream happen. It may not! But for now. Now I'm just so very happy and grateful to have goal - even if it means that I will have to stay put for a loooong while. I guess it remains to be seen how well this restless soul can hack it... Best start booking those flights already now!

Nighty night...

Insomnia is bothering me. Well, it isn't insomnia the condition per se of course as I've only suffered from it tonight...  But nevertheless, here I am sitting on the sofa in the dark, listening to soft snores from inside the cardboard box on the floor. It's the cat's new favourite spot these days; a big cardboard box in which a bathroom shelving got delivered a few days ago. The thing is really ugly and far too big for the living room. But suckers R Us, and the cat is winning 100-1. (The one point comes from me successfully teaching him to move away from the front door when I snap my fingers. Otherwise he just ignores us and does whatever he pleases. Of course. He's a cat.)

There are a million thoughts whirling in my mind, everything to do with what I ought to be doing. Study, work, work, study, study, work, study, work... I don't want to. But it is what I signed up for and it is the price I am paying for leaving a quiet, steady, relatively struggle-free job where I was mind-numbingly bored. Huh, I am most definitely no longer bored. How I long for those easy days now. I'm already feeling my itchy feet starting to want to make a move. But I resist. Still. I can't think of another job that will tick as many boxes as this one. I work with a really lovely bunch of people, some of whom are great friends. I get to spend my time in beautiful and unusual buildings in London, helping the occupying arts organisations build something exciting and thought provoking, to make a difference and to make people feel something. To make sense of the world. I am studying to become a chartered secretary, to become a leader. Only I am not sure if I want to be a leader. I am rather tired, and would like a little time out. But the show must go on. And on. And on.

And here I am, at 2 o'clock in the morning, unable to sleep, sitting on the sofa in the dark, now listening to two soft sounds of snoring (the bedroom door is open). Once in a while I stop writing and look at the night sky. The street lights are polluting the darkness into a hazy dark grey but we have a lovely warm glow from the light post below our windows. If I opened the window I would hear the odd whoosh of a car and every thirty minutes the night bus hums its way past, making all kinds of hissing and sighining sounds, as though it too would quite like to sleep... Sleep. Lovely, lovely sleep!

Ok, enough of this self-centered mild nightime melancholia. Tomorrow is a new day and I will be a new me. Or not. Most likely I will be painfully same. Perhaps a little more tired. I'll be spending the day dreaming about the next trip to Finland, the trip after that to Long Island, the one after that to Berlin and Dresden, and... Well, you get the picture. 

Time to go to bed and try the one trick that rarely fails. It's a frustrating one, taught to me by my psychology teacher several years ago. I will count from two hundred back very slowly, articulating every sound carefully in my head, and if thoughts veer off (which they inevitably do), I will just return to the number I remember as the last one I thought of, and continue counting down. I do this twice. Unless I've fallen asleep. It is guaranteed to work, but only if you're able to stick with it. On second thought perhaps I'll get a quicker result by digging the corporate law study book out...

Mind Over Matter

The antibiotics are kicking in and I'm starting to feel like the Old Me again. As in how-I-was-before-the-illness of course; nothing to do with the impending middle agedom in the form of what is popularly called the "new 30". Well, I say impending, but I still have another eight months and one day of the old thirty before hitting the next decade. The next decade, eh? Perfectly ok with it. Doesn't bother me one jot. 

But joking aside, thirtysomething has been an amazingly eventful and exciting decade; some great highs, a few lowly lows... At times easy, other times challenging, even scary, often quite confusing yet overall happy. I have worked in three amazing workplaces with the best workmates ever, I have completed my Masters degree, moved from a tiny dark hole into a Real Home (chaining myself into a mortgage...). I also got married, became a slave to two fluffy, sweet cats, got four amazing god kids, and 'nieces' and 'nephews', lost a loved one and travelled more than I could have ever dreamed in my twenties. I've learned a lot about the world and about the kind of person I am and want to be, and ultimately I realised how utterly gormless I was in my twenties. Hilariously, and sometimes a bit tragically gormless. 

Perhaps the new decade will be a little bit less of a rollercoaster ride and more serene than the roaring thirties. One can hope. But smite me down if I ever become dull...!!

I am a firm believer in Mark Twain's famous phrase: "Age is a mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." [Confession: in my twenties, i.e. the wonderfully foolish 90's, I thought a TV aerobics instructor going by the name of Mr Motivator came up with that little idiom. Yes. Really.] Denial, unawareness or selective awareness, I don't care. As long as I keep accidentally ticking the 30-35 age slot in questionnaires I'm all good.

Easter Peace

What bliss to have four full days to 'just be'! And how lucky to have a comfortable, light and cosy little home where to spend my unproductive relax-time with the husband and the little fluff butt of a cat. Thinking about it, this is the first Easter in many, many years where I have not given in to my wanderlust, and decided to stay at home instead. In fact, it may even be the first time in my entire adult life that I've not gone with my desire to be elsewhere when I've had a chance to go somewhere. Anywhere. But this time the break came just in the nick of time. I need to shrug off this cold that's been plaguing me for weeks. And I needed time to distance myself from work too. I have been so very, very tired.

Well then, a long weekend at home. How refreshing, how odd, and what a relief! Who'd have thought...

 

Work and Play

This weekend I went to a work conference. It's usually the one time in the entire year that all seventeen of us, partners and staff (plus a few associates), get together to share thoughts. I am very lucky to be working with a bunch of interesting, fun and intelligent people. Long may it last..!

We were treated to a lot of super interesting and thought enhancing presentations by the partners and associates, ranging from Rules for the Conduct of Life (an 18th century guide for the Freemen of City of London) to more practical topics such as exploring what kind of a CRM system we should adopt as we grow as a business. But I had one particular favourite presentation by one of our associates. It was an exploration of who we are as individuals using Lego blocks. The idea was to build something that represents how we see ourselves or what makes us who we are. It's fascinating what we all came up with having only ten minutes to construct ourselves! 

I found that finnishness is a really large part of my identity (no surprises there), so my core was built of blue and white blocks. These blocks were sandwiched between two different green blocks. The bottom one was light green and the top one was dark green. They represented the two isles that ground me - Ireland through being Irish-in-law, and Great Britain, which has given me a home, and where I feel free to be who I am without anyone questioning it or asking me to explain my choices. From the top green 'Britain block' went out a red shoot (passion?) which showed my need to be removed from my core state every once in a while, allowed by the fact that I live in the UK, from where there is easy access everywhere in the world. At the end of the shoot I put a little cross which represented a compass. That leads to what the title of my blog is too: my itchy feet. If it weren't for these grounding blocks of my life I would probably follow that red shoot and move about the world, quenching the thirst of learning about all the weird and wonderful things that this planet of ours offers. As it is I can only do that in small portions, and money (or lack if it) means that I haven't gone as far as I would have maybe liked. Then again, I wonder if this is in fact true. Maybe it's just a convenient excuse. Knowing myself, I have a tendency to do things I want to do regardless of any perceived obstacles. So perhaps it's good that I haven't gone and fulfilled these dreams of eternal travel - after all we all need something or another to look forward to in our lives, and of course, sometimes the important thing about the dream is not the final destination but rather the pursuit...

Life's a-OK

What an awesome and wunderbar weekend!

Friday night the husband and I went to our mate Emma's 50th birthday party at Little Nan's Cocktail Bar at a secret location in Greenwich. What a treat of a start for the weekend! I had a teapot of Peggy Mitchell: lime, campari, prosecco, sugar and mint leaves. Yum! We had cake, blasted some party poppers, talked utter rubbish and drank cocktails from deinty teacups. Bliss!

On Saturday, the sun delighted us with its presence after a rainy morning. Hurrah for the Spring! I went for lunch in Tooting Broadway with four other girls. Our friend Sarah is building a website dedicated to health food, and we were invited to test out the material. The food was absolutely sublime! It was all raw, and the menu consisted of filled avocados, courgette spaghetti with olives, semi-dried tomatoes and a little bit of goats cheese, and for dessert we had the most tasty key lime pie I have ever tasted in my entire life! Absolutely beautiful. I won't post photos here, as she'll be doing that herself once her site is up. But if you're on Instagram, you can take a peek: @waddayathink. It was a lovely, chilled afternoon, and the food and the company made me infinitely happier!

In the evening Dan and I met up with a group of close friends for food and cider in New Cross House. Mmmm. I had a pizza with choritzo and jalapeños, and forgot all about my resolve from only a few hours back to lead a healthier life..! But ho hum. While the food may have been bad for my ever expanding body, the evening with all its grease, booze and laughter was manna for the soul.

The plan was to de-tox this week after all the over indulgence since Friday night, but then I realised that we are going flying to Ireland to see the in-laws on Wednesday night. Phew... Oohh... Will I live through this?? Can't wait, though!

It's a sunny Sunday, and I'm watching a croggy Himalayan Persian turning around, changing his sleeping position on the sofa. I ought to be studying Corporate Law but I just cannot bring myself to do it. The sunlight is flowing into the flat. The birds are racing along the narrow passage between the buildings. I just opened the balcony door and can hear them sing. And then a bug flew in! I'm very glad spring is on its way. If only I could just shrug off this post-flu cough that's plaguing me.

Now I'm off to the Finnish Church to buy some chocolate for D for his birthday tomorrow. Yeah. Things are ok. 

First One

Well. This blog will no doubt be the most unstructured and pointless bit of scribbling I have ever created. But it is a fact that I am in desperate need of some kind of self expression, and this is my chosen medium. I can only apologise in advance for whatever mundane trash I may spew on these pages, with topics about as exciting as a wet woolly sock with a hole in the toe. And the heel. But fearlessly I plough on. To quote (or rather update) that famous song by the gorgeous Lesley Gore: it's my blog and I cry if I want to. 

Until the next time!