Image originally uploaded to Flickr by moriza
Lovely podcast from Design*Sponge on achieving a work/life balance. Funny how a very individual tale can teach more than all the generic platitudes in the world.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Balance
Lovely podcast from Design*Sponge on achieving a work/life balance. Funny how a very individual tale can teach more than all the generic platitudes in the world.
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Ceaselessly beginning
So, it's been a hectic couple of months and I've been meaning to blog the whys and wherefores. I've resigned my job to do an MA in Victorian Studies, after two years (some of my nearest and dearest would argue longer, I'm sure!) of vacillating and trying to decide if I should stay or I should go.
It's all very exciting and I am looking forward to January very much.
Classes have started and I am currently juggling work and classes and reading which is hard going but it's so much fun and so endlessly rewarding. I gave a seminar talk on Bleak House a few weeks ago, and am in the middle of two essays: one on Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, and the efficacy of the poet's voice in exploring the divine, and one on the moral interpretations of the disordered domestic space in Dickens – and goodness me, I know I've done the right thing!
At work, as I've progressed, I've moved further and further away from the things that motivate me, doing very little creative and lots that requires me to ...well, not really be myself. The gap between 'real' me and 'work' was just getting wider and wider, and that can't be healthy. This is something I've wanted to do for a long, long time: I find academic work so challenging, rewarding, fulfilling, exciting. This is a chance to have a bit of a career sabbatical and think carefully about who I am, what makes me happiest, and what I really want from a career. I'm going to try to keep my hand in, through, by doing part-time/temping/freelance work in digital or publishing (publishing friends: fair warning, I'll be in touch soon, for a little of what they call “leveraging your network”) so I keep my options open. Here's to a portfolio career for the next six months or so.
Who knows what will come next?
As a person who is usually so concerned with the future and doing the “right” thing, I am strangely relaxed about all this ambiguity and uncertainty. Which, I guess, is all part of the process of getting back to where I want to be – wherever that turns out to be!
Hurrah for new starts.
"To be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning." George Eliot – thanks, Jude, for such an apt quote, and from a nineteenth century author too!
(The photo is from my very talented friend Verethragma's Flickr photostream: go and have a look, it's full of beauty)
It's all very exciting and I am looking forward to January very much.
Classes have started and I am currently juggling work and classes and reading which is hard going but it's so much fun and so endlessly rewarding. I gave a seminar talk on Bleak House a few weeks ago, and am in the middle of two essays: one on Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, and the efficacy of the poet's voice in exploring the divine, and one on the moral interpretations of the disordered domestic space in Dickens – and goodness me, I know I've done the right thing!
At work, as I've progressed, I've moved further and further away from the things that motivate me, doing very little creative and lots that requires me to ...well, not really be myself. The gap between 'real' me and 'work' was just getting wider and wider, and that can't be healthy. This is something I've wanted to do for a long, long time: I find academic work so challenging, rewarding, fulfilling, exciting. This is a chance to have a bit of a career sabbatical and think carefully about who I am, what makes me happiest, and what I really want from a career. I'm going to try to keep my hand in, through, by doing part-time/temping/freelance work in digital or publishing (publishing friends: fair warning, I'll be in touch soon, for a little of what they call “leveraging your network”) so I keep my options open. Here's to a portfolio career for the next six months or so.
Who knows what will come next?
As a person who is usually so concerned with the future and doing the “right” thing, I am strangely relaxed about all this ambiguity and uncertainty. Which, I guess, is all part of the process of getting back to where I want to be – wherever that turns out to be!
Hurrah for new starts.
"To be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning." George Eliot – thanks, Jude, for such an apt quote, and from a nineteenth century author too!
(The photo is from my very talented friend Verethragma's Flickr photostream: go and have a look, it's full of beauty)
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
A weekend of making
It's been a hectic old summer, especially workwise, but this weekend I finally made some time for making.
I finished The Boy's bobble hat,
and baked this fantastic pistachio cake with cream cheese frosting, mmmmm:
Having swapped a creative marketing job for a responsible middle management job about two years ago, I really find these weekend things very satisfying. I think it helps me bridge the gap between the "work me" and the "real me", which feel pretty separate these days. Now, to find a way to bring those two closer together ...
I finished The Boy's bobble hat,
knocked up a very stylish (if I say so myself) knitting bag from an old skirt to prevent the cat from running around the house with my half-finished knitting in her mouth,
and baked this fantastic pistachio cake with cream cheese frosting, mmmmm:
Having swapped a creative marketing job for a responsible middle management job about two years ago, I really find these weekend things very satisfying. I think it helps me bridge the gap between the "work me" and the "real me", which feel pretty separate these days. Now, to find a way to bring those two closer together ...
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