Older, but no wiser

No words of wisdom; but by way of an apology for the silence here lately, this is one of the things on my mind at the moment.

I have the opportunity for what could turn out to be a rather dramatic life change. Give the finger to a meaningless job, sell up, move out, start again somewhere new. My employer is looking to shed staff, and if I applied for voluntary redundancy there’s a good chance that I’d get it. After all, I’m over 50 and such skills and knowledge that I have are out of date in a business whose focus is exclusively high-tech. The pay-off would keep us going, at a pinch, for a year or so, and in that time we’d have to swap one lifestyle for something very different.

I say have to, because, regardless of whether I could get another job along the lines of what I do now, the fact is that I don’t want one; it would be utterly pointless to go through all the trauma of change only to end up back where I started, but surrounded by a different set of walls. Why walk out of one prison straight into another? No, if I’m going for change this has to be The Big One – a change to find a lifestyle and a way of spending the years that are left to me that is of my own choosing. Or more accurately, of our choosing – a complete family decision.

So I could quit, and survive for a year. But then what? If I’m not going to work for a Corporate, I need to find a way to live on a much lower income, hence the need to relocate, partly to lower the cost of living, but mostly to realise the equity tied up in the house.

And the knock-ons of such a move of course impact on those nearest and dearest to me.

It would be a dramatic change…


So why have I been keeping quiet about it all?

I had an unusual email several months ago, from a reader of this blog. Neatly wrapped in the compliments was the suggestion that I was becoming self obsessed, and the less time I spent focusing on my own problems, the happier I’d be. It sounded like good advice, but in opening the door to that thought it seems to have taken up residence in a way that neither I, nor I’m sure the writer, ever imagined. I find that I'm blocked from writing about my inner journey; in fact I find I’m not even having much of an inner journey any more - I keep hearing a nagging, scolding, jeering tongue in my head saying “self obsessed, self obsessed”, and so thoughts that centre on self die still-born.

So there we are. I said I’d talk about one of the things on my mind; that turned out to be two. There are others as well, but for now that’ll do.