Fallen Feather

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I once read somewhere that finding a feather in your path symbolizes the freedom of flight.

Or  was it flight being freedom?

Either works today.

I’m not spiritual, or superstitious, or religious….I’m a logical thinker and I don’t put any stock in the supernatural; that’s all in one’s head. But the timing is ironic given that I’ve been feeling like I need to take flight again, in a way.

I’m not sure if I did something stupid, or freeing, but I sent an email to someone today saying that I was (figuratively speaking of course) ready to take flight unless one of two things were to happen/change, because a life circumstance/roadblock had unexpectedly changed as of yesterday.

I identified those two options.

Have you ever had those life circumstances that where a roadblock prevents any change and that’s somehow ….comfortable.

A roadblock to change seems to have dematerialized.

Specifically, something I/we never thought would happen/be agreed to…suddenly became acceptable to an outside barrier.

I’ve never really been a fan of comfortable. My life has been one change after another; change has never bothered me excessively…. change is good.

It bugs me when I get too comfortable.

I’ve never done one job for this long in my life. And it hasn’t even really been this long. It’s only just been nine years…but that’s longer than I’ve ever done anything without a significant change.

My life has been one long series of “Enough of that, let’s do this”. I’ve uprooted repeatedly and started over. Sometimes it’s been my choice, but not always.

But every change has brought new challenges, and new and wonderful people into my life.

And I love this work, so I’m not ready to leave, maybe….just…shift things a bit.

So today, I said to someone…in writing (what the hell was I thinking!) that I was ready for one of two things to happen, or a third thing would probably happen.

And he pounced.

I didn’t know that he’d accepted a temporary role that could actually help make one of those things happen.

He phoned me and said “So how would you like to get here? I can put you on a plane, a boat, or I can come and get you in the hot rod.”

Well…?

Now what.

Put up or shut up. Right?

I was the one who put it out there.

A feather means flight or freedom. But flight doesn’t mean leaving, it just means taking wing from what’s bogging you down and making the effort to fix it so that you last longer than you otherwise might.

You can’t help what you love if you leave, but you can make it better by making a change that helps your own sanity and, therefore, makes you more effective because you aren’t coming unglued at random moments.

And making this change might actually help the entire program because it will force another change and “should” force a decision from someone to deal with some other issues that aren’t being adequately addressed.

Change is good.

And sometimes you have to think about your own well being within all of that.

Right?

And, amusingly, with this photo, I’m putting a Flicker feather on Flickr 🙂