Enjoying the Ride

I'm sitting here looking at this dashboard screen, and I don't even really know where to start.

Okay, okay, I know. Have you all seen Working Girl? (Not to be confused with Working Girls.) You know, the quintessential Harrison Ford/ Melanie Griffith movie where the unnoticed, underpaid, underappreciated office assistant gets herself into some risky business, and for a while it looks like she might just end up unemployed on Staten Island, but it all turns out okay in the end because she’s sleeping with Harrison Ford, and as everyone knows, that’s magic.

Wow, I just censored myself so bad right there.

Anyway, you know that scene at the end? Where she realizes that the office with the door that closes and the incredible view out over the city is hers, and she puts her feet up and picks up her phone to call Joan Cusack, and then that totally inspirational Carly Simon song (click the button beside the title to preview) starts playing and you get this almost irresistible urge to deck yourself out in shoulder pads and pumps? That one?

Well, you may not believe this, but I HAVE THAT OFFICE.

No jokes. With the door and everything. It has a view that looks out over mountains and water and Canada Place Vancouver. There are hooks on the walls where I need to hang things. Like maybe diplomas. Except I won’t be hanging diplomas – I’ll be hanging a mirror so that I can check that I don’t have anything hanging out of my nose before I go to meetings. That will be much more useful.

I also have the job to match the office, an almost giddy sense of elevated responsibility, control of all communications activities in a fairly high profile provincial organization, and the eminently relieving feeling that I’ve got everything back on track. I do not have shoulder pads.

Most of you know that I spent the last year or so in a job that was increasingly doing me no favours. I left it on the 13th of March. Before I left I was worried I was making the wrong decision. I’m not naturally a risk taker. As soon as I left I knew it was the right thing to do.

Today I sat down next to TM and explained my current good mood. I can’t really remember the last time that I felt like this. I have been really happy in Vancouver. But I have to admit that those periods of happiness were never sustained. My good moods were tainted by the knowledge that something would eventually happen to spoil them. And I promise that’s not self-determinism.

This mood isn’t. This mood is free and insouciant. I feel like everything is moving forward and this mood can and will be sustained. Everything I’m doing, and I’m doing so much, seems to me to be carried along by its own momentum. It feels effortless. I’m sad to say I’d forgotten what that was like. I’m glad to say it’s back.