PERSPECTIVE

Sometimes I wonder why certain things have to unfold, why bad things happen to good people and why we can't just all immediately get what our hearts desire. Getting to where I want to be often appears so fraught with challenges and obstacles that dwarf me with how insurmountable they seem; makes a girl want to just throw in the towel without even half-trying. 




One thing I've been trying to do recently is looking at situations from another point of view and pushing the envelop on my current perspectives. Things might not be as clear in the here and now, and most of the time it's only with the power of hindsight that we manage to see the clarity and purpose of why we have to go through so much to get to where we want to go. 

We were aiming for the husband to nab a Houston posting and when that fell through, we moped around for a bit before the opportunity to relocate to London came around. We hesitated for a long while: it wasn't exactly what we really wanted; we weren't sure if it was worth it giving up everything we'd known so comfortably for something we weren't 100% about; we weren't certain if it would lead to something bigger... Doubts, fears, questions. But then we started to talk about things in a different way: We had been saying for ages that we needed to move out of Singapore before I turned 30, because if we kept sitting around in the little red dot and not trying to make things happen, we'd always be stuck without knowing what could have been. London was calling and it was giving us the very thing we wanted: to get out there into the big, big world. So we took it and ran with it.

The situation on the work front isn't all that rosy and my hours are pretty brutal (6.30am starts in the winter, anyone?). But looking at it another way, I now have a lot more time in the afternoons to do the things I really want to do. I can start my runs at 5pm and come home in time comfortably to fix dinner for us. I can enjoy time with a book before a 6pm yoga class, sitting outside the studio in the sun with my protein bar and a tumbler of lemon water. I have time to take long walks alone with just my thoughts for company. I can bake to my little heart's content and fill the house with treats for the husband when he comes home. I have so much more time to talk to him in the evenings, and our conversations are a lot more about us and a lot less about work. It's not that bad a situation, really. 

While I might not understand or even like where I currently find myself, I choose to believe there is always a purpose for the journey I have to take and the paths I have to trudge along.

You have to go there to come here.

This is one of my favorite sayings and those eight little words hold so much truth within them.

So this is a small, but very important, lesson I've been learning these past couple of months since we moved to the +44. There is always more than one perspective and sometimes all you have to do is give yourself the chance to look at things from another viewpoint. It might wind up being a lot prettier from that lookout than from the edge you're now perched precariously on.


(Picture credits: Chema Madoz via Visual News)