Quiet and Content

Last night at around 8:30 I was lying on the couch writing in my paper journal. My partner was sitting in the rocking chair in my bedroom with his computer on a tray table doing his homework. My daughter was sitting up to the dinner table in the living room doing her homework. The tv was turned off. There was no music on. The upstairs was quiet.

I just stopped and savored the focused silence of the house, the peacefulness of the quiet that had other people in it. This is how my house should be, I thought.

Not all the time, of course. I want evenings of laughter, of games, of friends over, of movie watching too. But this evening of focused silence has been all too rare -- and it was deeply nurturing to me.

The journal writing was difficult at first. I spend so much time at a keyboard that I've fallen out of the knack of hand-writing -- but the more I relaxed into the silence, the more easily the words flowed from my fingers.

Bringing It Together

One of the frustrations these days -- albeit a minor one -- is the way that my personal, reflective writing is scattered throughout many places. I have LJ, which has been an important venue for shared reflections. In addition to my personal journal, I belong to a couple of groups, and I comment on the journals of others.

Then I have a program called "Life Journal" which I use on an irregular basis, often to record my dreams. It has a nice tagging feature, a life timeline feature, and different formats for daily notes and dreams.

I have paper journals which have also been used on a not-so-frequent basis over the past few years. These have no tags, but the writing is usually more raw and immediate. It's also where I have the writing from times when I'm off by myself, away from computers.

Finally there is email with the special people in my life where important things are said and discovered in the course of conversation. I have folders dedicated to specific people, emails kept that need to be preserved. One of the big regrets of my journaling life is that the email record of my pregnancy is lost.

Consolidating what I have is possible. I could easily fire up Life Journal and Live Journal and enter, cut and paste, and tag in each venue, filtering Live Journal as appropriate. Then I would have a complete record, tagged, in separate venues for redundancy.

But that's a lot of work, a lot of time spent revisiting the past when I need so much to move forward.

At the same time, I really like the idea of having the record of my life in one coherent sequence, where I (or someone else someday) could sit down and just read through, or track patterns or people through the tags. I wonder sometimes what I've forgotten that I never thought I would, what a-ha moments have been lost along the way. I want to be sure to remember.

Looking Ahead

If all goes as planned (and we've had to reschedule and delay because of illness and other factors) this afternoon I will sit down with one of our senior project managers and do a gap analysis between the PM 2 position and my resume, and then make a plan for how I can get whatever experience I need to fill those gaps and be a desireable candidate for one of the regular openings on their team.

It's also a way to be sure that he is familiar with the less-obvious aspects of my past history, like managing eight(?) product launches for the rocket company. In fact, I was the person who insisted that we create a launch process and checklist to be sure that each step was completed in a timely fashion and we were aware of dependencies which might prevent progress in another area.

I believe I am already qualified for the job. It's simply a matter of being trained in the processes of this department.

And I also feel very lucky that this guy is someone I've known since my early days as a temp at this company, someone who has always been a warm, friendly supporter. He is actively interested in helping me.

At our staff meeting earlier this week one of our field directors announced that one of his supervisors had resigned to move to another state to be with her fiance. The announcement was greeted with loud exclamations of dismay and all kinds of questions about what had been done or could yet be done to keep her with the company, even if we lost her from our team. I'd never heard such a response before, and I wondered what kind of response I would get if I announced my resignation. Would a roomfull of directors and VP's start brainstorming ways to keep me on the team? Or would they simply sigh, say "That's too bad, but we wish her luck" and let it go at that?