Pushing on

My blog post titles are in the main somewhere between the informative and eclectic. Usually they are pretty much nonsense, which anyone who finds them is left wondering quite how they relate to what I've actually written underneath. Today's two words do though simply describe my recent endeavours both on the move and in the workplace.

On the move I have been pushing on through the niggles and frustrations of injury hit marathon training. With the event looming ever closer on the horizon I have tried to push on through both the physical and mental aspects of a very broken training plan.

In work I have also been pushing on towards the end of my current contract and then towards well who knows what. At the current time there is no extension, no obvious sideways move, and no simple next step work wise. The kind of work that I have undertaken for the last 15 years is most likely coming to an end and I have felt the need to look seriously at what comes next rather than having another spin on the old merry-go-round. Working through a potentially crucial period like this has been hard and will continue to be hard, but I am viewing it like my running in so far as I want to identify the next goal carefully and then progress towards it.

You might wonder then why it is I choose to train for and run a marathon at such a time? It would on the face of it look pretty perverse. Well in all honesty I looked at all the other factors around my life at the moment and on  balancing the whole picture concluded that there might be no better time than now. Principally my children are very young and as they grow there will be a long period where I'll want to be ensuring they are on the move with clubs and activities (both sporting and academic).

Certainly the training time has provided 'space' to put aspects of the work changes in true perspective. That I made a busy time busier should trouble me, but it doesn't in the slightest as the fact I juggled the two has made me all the more sure a change is needed - in days gone by faced between a choice between work and life I would have chosen work hands down. Now I want the balance, I want to say 'no' to working so far above and beyond my job description and 'no' to it consuming my relationships with everything outside of it (family, health, friendships...). Sadly that I can not fulfill my current role within a balanced framework is partly because of the dogma of that specific work environment and also in no small part because of where I choose to place my focuses in undertaking the role (a whole other essay that would take too long to write just now). The areas I derived satisfaction from are in no way measurable in the digital system metric applied to this and so many job roles.

I am busy, I am on the move, and I am as the title above says 'Pushing on'.