I often meet people in my work who are waiting… just waiting for the right moment to make a change. I have come to call this (to myself, not to them) “living contingently”. Typically this state involves the mind-set “I will make a change when … the mortgage is paid, the kids have left home, I get a new boss, the new year comes”. In one in a hundred people this set of circumstances may miraculously occur… for the rest of us movement usually begins when we realise that we are waiting for a time and a set of circumstances that will never arrive…

Rather than being disheartening this insight is liberating. It comes with the realisation that we can begin to switch-on our lives whenever we choose… in a small way…

I’d like to say that this process is easy-peasy but actually it takes self-awareness, discipline and persistence (great fun though!!)

I’m into my poetry at the moment and the poem below describes one persons journey at the beginning of this realisation…the moment you start to be different, and the moment that people start to realise that you are “in-motion” (see precession below).

Enjoy and have a good day…

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

(Mary Oliver)