A Month

It is Sunday midnight, which used to be one of the worst and most stressful times of the week due to being afraid of the coming very probable half-sleepless night and the following working week (and month and year). However, this time I was driving back home from a close friend of mine in a good mood, playing music aloud and half singing. Realizing this made me turning volume even louder, wow!

A couple of different friends just said, that hey, you already look better, are more relaxed, laugh more and are a kind of a different person compared to the previous year. Nice. Actually, I also even grabbed on to my piano a few times this week. And started seriously thinking about and looking how to arrange a few short travels to meet some relatives. Some clear progress in one month!

We don´t notice the gradual changes so easily, either in ourselves or around us. This is how and why you can eventually end up for a stress sick leave; step by step. It is beneficial frequently to stop for thinking and observing in a longer term. We all know this, but it´s hard sometimes. You can´t make a difference between two consecutive days, but still one day you suddenly sit face to face with the doctor, who is proposing you a stress leave. As stated above, in terms of observing yourself, people around are valuable. Like a company psychologist. I met her five times during a few months starting from when I was ordered to take a break a year ago. Those were the only spots she ever has had on me, so it was easy for her to compare my appearance between the visits.

ps. One gift item received from ex-colleagues is a colouring book for adults, which I haven´t tried before. Makes it very enjoyable to drift in your thoughts completely; a perfect way of wasting hours I’d say!

Candlelight Stories

Free floating of 3,5 weeks has now passed. It has felt like diving at times also. Partly these weeks remind like a beginning of a longer vacation, but some aspects goes now more in to extreme. The first week went in a working mode, so real relaxing did not take place. The second week came and tiredness gathered during the couple of years started to crawl out from inside; I rested more and got only more tired. This is still not too unusual, but spooky feelings appear, when you get out of the bed in the afternoon, do the dishes from the breakfast at dusk and live a lot alone at a night, which is by the way a good time for writing in to a blog. In Finnish mid-winter there´s not too many hours of daylight to be wasted even in the south coast and I´m currently using most of it for sleeping. In the fourth week the sleeping rhythm is still half upside-down, but let it be, as long as there is a regular solid period of sleep.

The sleeping issue has been on the table for a couple of years, or actually ten years i.e. all my career in a small scale. I seem to be pretty sensitive to the stress and to any kind of distractions in life in terms of sleep. This is not the best feature in a hectic business work especially if it included also late hours, some travelling at awkward times and so on. Being constantly worried about getting enough sleep, having half of a nights between Sunday and Monday, going slightly crazy after not optimally rested Saturday-Sunday and waking up early ready to hit the road on Saturday morning after seeing excel tables in your dreams, is a point, where you should understand you are running in troubles. Maybe you sometimes, or even regularly use sleeping pills, which was something I did not want to take permanently in my life. So I left.

A couple of days ago I had a first time since leaving the office a few minute Skype call with my nice ex-team mate from Central Europe right after very nicely slept night waking up at 1pm. She asked laughing, ”Mr. Xxxx, did you just wake up!?” I just loved having that call, question and smile.After that I went directly out for a “morning run”, as it was extremely sunny and bright afternoon, which is rare here in North at this time of a year.

Kickstart My Heart

October the 15th 2016 I wrote a following status update in Facebook:

Resigned from my job yesterday, honestly, absolutely without any “rationale” or “irrational” plan (next job, studying, travelling, even making a long holiday, turning myself to a hippie etc.) what I will or would like to do. Notice period is two months, assumably partly working, partly consuming holidays, will see.

The idea in this blog is to follow up what happens, when someone leaves the steady income in a white-collar jobs after 10 years and takes a break of an undefined period of time in order to rest and recover from a smaller burn-out symptoms, see the world and life with brighter eyes again, search for his lost intuition, get more in balance, find more meaning and peace, not only, but also, in his professional life..

It was two weeks ago, when I had my last day at the office and on the 1st of Jan 2017 I was unemployed non-worker. Free. Recovering burn-out patient.

I´m not rich, I don´t have a huge savings, can breath for a while though, but not for too long. Repeating, I absolutely have no plan to any direction; what will I do after I have finished working? What to do after the break? No idea. Only thing I know is, that I won’t be a controller again soon in a financial department of a multinational corporation, unless there is no other alternative.

So, what I´m doing is, that I’m testing this hypothesis, an expected outcome of letting go (of course you should not expect anything, because if you do, nothing happens!). As you know, some the wise men say, that you need first to throw the old crap away from your life before taking in something new and better. They also say, that by the time you slow down and let your inner voice speak, you will find your passion; that some day you will just know what you need to do. Will I know, remains to be seen.