Fifty Blogs and Still Breathing

This is Blog #50 and yes, I am still breathing. I wasn’t always doing that when I started. It felt a little strange and often uncomfortable in the beginning. Hitting that publish post button and making that leap from my computer into cyberspace was a bit rattling. Now that I look back it was after all, the first time I had put my words out there to the world. That is cause enough to stop breathing for a moment.

Each day since I have left my corporate job I feel farther away from that life. Creating this blog, sharing with you what my observations are has helped me to do that. What at first felt uncomfortable, is starting to become a groove. A groove I fell out of these last weeks, as I found myself selected as a Jury member on a trial that went on for 13 days.

Don’t get me wrong. I took my civic duty seriously. In fact, I think everyone should have this experience. It is watching the system in action, and while not perfect, it does work.

But it got harder to write, because the time was just not there. And often at the end of the day, I was just too drained. There was little space for me to write a page in my novel, much less a blog that made any sense. It reminded me of how I was always squeezing my writing in when I was still in Corporate America. It was never easy for me to just shift from one mode to the other. It reminded me that I like it better the way it is now. I found myself missing my groove.

The trial was a civil one which involved determining whether there was a breach of contract. The irony for me was that the two parties’ business relationship began in 1997, which coincidentally was the year I moved back to NYC and started my last corporate gig. While they parted ways in 2003, the entanglement continued until this month and this trial.

Listening to dates of letters and incidents being reviewed, I found myself reflecting in those moments as the lawyers searched through the 350 odd documents they had brought in to find the one they wanted, to where I was at that time, what I was doing, and with whom. In some bizarre twist of dates and fate, I found some sort of new closure. I felt, maybe for the first time, that that part of my life was behind me and it was time to move fully forward.

I ran into a few of the people I used to work with today at lunch. I was reminded that for a good long while we had a great run. But now, I am on a different track. Like the trial I bore witness to, that part of my life is now recessed. And I am still breathing.