Over the last five or six months, my life has changed dramatically. I have made one of those paradigm shifts and when one does that, everything changes.
For us humans, a paradigm is the model we build in our heads of how the world is supposed to work. Whenever we have to make a decision or we have to choose how we are going to handle a situation, we use our own particular paradigm to guide our actions and choices. A paradigm shift occurs when we have experiences which cause us to reevaluate how we see things and we revise our paradigm, our model of the world.
Towards the end of my time at my last job, what I was doing had ceased to be much fun and even before the office closed, I knew deep down that it was time to move on to something different.
When my life as a tech support person with an internet provider came to an end in mid-December last year, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. For a brief period, I had the luxury of having the time to think about my life and about what I wanted to do now that I needed to find another job.
In a way, the time between jobs was a really lovely time. I could slow the pace of my life. It was momentarily no longer necessary to run from one obligation or commitment to the next. I could stand on the sidelines and watch everyone else race about like semi-crazy people, functioning mindlessly on autopilot. I could clear my head and try to think clearly not just about where I wanted to work next, but also where I wanted to take my life, in general.
I found some work sooner than I might have wished to do that. But when the money shortfall became critical, I did not have much of a choice. So I was back in the grind and as I took on more and more responsibility at work, I found myself back into that world of get up in the morning, go to work, come home, make dinner, clean the kitchen, check the bills and if I was very lucky to catch a little television. Suddenly, once again, there are just not enough hours in the day to get to everything which I needed to take care of. Most evenings now, I have just enough time to put out the biggest fires and then to crash to catch 5 or 6 hours of sleep if I am lucky.
While I worked in internet tech support, I worked the 3 to 11 shift. So even then, I had started to stay up late at night when it was very quiet and the television set had been turned off. Only then could I truly hear myself think. Only then could I begin to make sense of what was happening to me and of the options from which I could choose.
Now, I really cannot do the late night thing. The morning comes much too soon and it only takes one or two nights of staying up until one or two AM to make me become something of a zombie during the day. And being really tired and fuzzy-brained is not something I can afford to be as an administrative assistant. I have to be sharp and wide awake. Returning back to the normal office hours has forced me to make some major adjustments in the way I live each day.
However, only now am I coming to terms with the most important adjustment I have had to make. For me to keep my psychological balance... for me to be able to have some sense of where I have been, where I am now and where I am headed, I need time every day to take stock of the day. I need that time to make the small mid-course corrections that enable me to stay on course. But staying up late into the night is obviously no longer a viable option.
So here I sit, before my computer, trying to figure out how I am going to handle this problem. How am I going to carve out a block of time each day to do this, when I don't even have time enough for all the other things on my list of things to do? Honestly, I don't know yet. As has been my habit in the past, it is late at night, almost midnight. I am stealing time from my sleep because for the moment I don't know what else to do.
But, my gracious readers, stay tuned. I will work out this critical matter. I will have to give up something else, to create this island in time so that I will have my time to reflect on things. I suspect that I am not the only person on this planet who has this problem. Hopefully, whatever strategy I work out may be something that you can use in one form or another. When I have worked out a solution I will get back with you.
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