Thursday, December 15, 2011

Change is good. I think.


My last post notwithstanding, I am excited about my new job. If you are an eager beaver and read the last post before 8:30 Thursday morning, go back and read the addendum I added that expresses my feelings a little more clearly. Talk to me in a month and I'll be on top of the world.

The upside of change is that (they say) it is as good as a rest. Not that fire chiefing in Upsala is a strenuous job on most days. Humdrum paperwork, vehicle and equipment checks, training, planning, record keeping, public education, and various projects and missions I've taken on to round out my days . . . these are the things that keep an Upsala Fire Chief busy. We do have fires occasionally, and respond to highway incidents more frequently, and some days can be crazily hectic and over-the-top stressful because we are very few in number . . . but hectic isn't the norm.

In the past nine months or so, however, I've had frequent urges to ditch the whole thing and escape to Tahiti to lie on the beach for a few decades and forget. You can read undertones of these feelings in my March 29 post "The Peril of Caring." 

Stress isn't always the crush-you-to-powder style that crashes down in one event. It can be, as the analogy goes, little stones piled into your stress-backpack over years, and if you don't figure out how to unload them, one day one more little stone added to the heap breaks your back. My back isn't broken, but I had a wake up call a couple months after I wrote the March 29 post.

Relax, this isn't going to turn into another soul-searching Oprah post, and I'm not going to talk about my wake up call. I said all that to say, I'm ready for change, even though it isn't what I expected. Again, talk to me in a month and I'll tell you if it is as good as a rest.

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