Out and about..
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It is perhaps something between wildly optimistic and foolhardy to call it for spring in the first week of March, but given the many days of sustained highs with temperatures north of 14C and nary a cloud in sight, one can be forgiven for snatching at these first nascent signs of spring. Whilst we haven’t had to do the hard yards folk up north have, with 21 consecutive days of rain or Arctic Canada-esque levels of snow, the grey skies and intermittent drizzles we have braved managed to cut to the bone in the end. The past few days which have included waking up to sunlight streaming in through the windows have been enough to lull the almost five year old into repeatedly asking, Is it summer yet? Truth be told, the weather is only half the reason for her impatient welcoming of summer – someone (not me!) promised her a party on turning five, the prospect of which has her wishing time would speed up. Fortunately or unfortunately, wishes are not horses, so that beggar won’t be getting a ride anytime soon.
Putative spring apart, it is also Lent, which I decided to (loosely) observe this year. An overarching sense of listlessness and apathy has been the bane of my life over the past couple of years, hence the allure of a season of rest and unplugging. The idea is to give up scale back significantly on social media. I haven’t been on X Twitter a lot for quite sometime now having pivoted to Bluesky, but between LinkedIn and my (admittedly) incessantly refreshing of TheLayoff, social media and its ills have been my bane. Along with that I have been journaling along with JD Walt on the WakeUp Call.
I sense the itch to begin another season of being prodigal abroad, not helped by a series of work events which have seriously dented whatever tenuous notion of loyalty to an employer I might still have. Part of it is certainly the sense of being stuck in a mid-career malaise, one in which decisions to stay down the narrow path of being a technical specialist are being silently questioned. Recent events in the Middle East are a counterpoint to what might have been a more straight forward decision but to riff on an offhand comment someone made to me recently, the decision has to be to bloom where one is planted until there is a decision to be made.
