Testing, testing

As regular readers might have noticed, I too find myself in the midst of a fascinating professional transformation. In the blogosphere this theme receives a lot of attention; often in either litanies or personal success stories. Millions of people worldwide find themselves having to adjust, and wiggle their bums in the sand called life, to somehow get to feel comfortable again.

I haven’t yet found my new grove. Whatever I do think I’m good at, or talented with, or maybe even see as a ‘mission in life’ has proved not to be a source of potential income in the foreseeable future. As I stated in an earlier blog here, there is a quality to having to seriously cut down on each and every purchase I make. My empty wallet forces me to become aware of how much money I have wasted in the past on every conceivable good.

And it challenges me now to be creative while spending what little I do get in, and really and genuinely enjoy every little bit of it. Best of all: the present financial drought challenges me to completely and utterly remove every perception of “box” in my life, and try everything I haven’t yet tried to earn whatever amount of cash I can lay my hand on.

Life is about soaking up experiences.

Whenever I saw a slogan like that in the past, trying to sell some kind of adrenalin-rush-causing adventure anywhere, I’d shrug it off as some kind of decadence. I’d wonder who’d be having such a bored life that he needs some artificial thing happening to make him realise he’s alive. I, as an established journalist, got all the adrenalin needed for an exciting life out of the work I did, including dodging bullets in Somalia or mad drivers in Burundi.

But now I see how experiencing the experience of life itself is actually much more interesting that the most dangerous of adrenaline releasing adventure in a theme park, or at the end of a bungee cord.

To really fall off the cliff of one’s own comfort zone. Into an abyss of insecurity, where only faith will eventually teach you how to soar – faith not in some kind of imagined or wanted outcome, but the purest of faith: that whatever happens is what is supposed to happen, and I can deal with that. It is this final addition that shifts fatalism to faithfulness.

Now that‘s an adventure worth living!

And it’s an experience not wholly enjoyable or easy. On the contrary. Taking on new assignments to build a new foundation is hard, I’ve noticed. It’s not so much the finding them, as it is the getting them. Doing a variety of test assignments makes me realise how rich the vocation of writing actually is. But above all else: after twenty years in newspaper journalism and a bunch of nominations for prestigious awards I get a lesson in swallowing my pride. “The chimney needs to smoke.”

So these days I do tests for assignments I would never have even considered taking on, for a fee I would have laughed at, and for an audience I couldn’t be less interested in.

Every assignment, every word, every dollar is a twig in my new nest.

A phoenix rising from the ashes.

Do I think it’ll be easy? No, not for a second.

It’s harder than any ‘adventure’ Ive had before.

This time my survival is on the line.