Happy Sunday everyone!

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about work. It’s a strange creature, really. Simply by labeling something as “work,” no matter what your profession, it automatically downgrades even the most fun task to something banal, mundane even. More on that later.

When I came to a point in my life where I felt  it was time to stop flitting about, taking dance classes, and pursuing more creative opportunities (read: being poor dancer), I managed to talk myself in to taking a job grossly out of my field. I struggled, and, admittedly cried the first two weeks straight. I was in a world of profit and productivity, and all I wanted to do was to write an eloquently worded email, hoping someone would notice that I was bright, trying my hardest to fall in line in some place I didn’t belong. I gave myself a year, and 11 months in, I had a meeting with a colleague I was working with at the time. He seemed off, but I brushed it off as overworked, just like the rest of us. It wasn’t until he started blurting overly personal information out at me for no reason that I became concerned. His kids didn’t know him. His wife hated him. He hated his life. I, in turn, told him a completely unrelated story of my good friend, who was unhappy at her job, subsequently quit, and traveled.  His involuntary candor unsettled me, but what unsettled me more was that I might be in his shoes one day, no matter where I worked. I left almost a month after that.

I learned so, so many things at my previous job. I’m proud and glad I did it. It’s given me a perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. You could say this about all experiences, really, good or bad. This brings me back to what I wrote about in my previous post: choice. There is something so powerful in choosing how you let experiences affect you. When I wake up in the morning, I choose to be happy. I choose to be hopeful, and to see the possibilities for good in other people and situations, even when past experiences have taught me not to. There’s a great deal to be said about being able to decide how your day-to-day life goes, and to know that the world doesn’t owe you anything, and that that’s ok. I could go on and on about this, but I’m really just beginning to understand it myself. I also came across this earlier today:

As the description says, everyone needs to see this at least once. It’s especially useful for those hard days when everyone and everything is just plain awful/annoying/rude/hurtful/creepy/scary. So don’t just default, don’t sit around and let life happen to you. That’s just too easy.

Love,

EVA♥