15/2/13 - The Purpose of Long Service Leave

It is a beautiful thing to just wake up in the morning. Just wake up because your body says it has had enough sleep. To wake up unassisted by an alarm or the encouragement of children, either yours on the ones next door.  And when one lives ‘in’ the Wesley College Boarding House – there’s quite a few of those!  

The next thing that is wonderful about LSL is having the freedom to decide what to do with your day. There are no ‘have tos’ on LSL. If you feel like it you can just roll over and go back to sleep, or you can lie around on the couch all day just watching the TV (but there’s no cricket on the TV here in NYC so what’s the point?). You can eat whatever and whenever you like. Every day is about making a decision and acting upon it. It may seem trivial in the beginning, but choosing what to do each day is a big step when there is nothing and no one to tell you what you have to do.

The power to have and to make choices has always seemed to me to be the point of a good education and one of the keys to a happy and fulfilling life. Choices are things that unfortunately some people don’t have. Worse still, some people, who do have choices, let the opportunity to choose fall by the wayside because the choices they are faced with are ‘too hard’ or because there are so many other more urgent (but ultimately much less important) things that need doing. So choices are overlooked and opportunities are missed. For some people this goes on, day after day until, eventually, their life becomes something that someone else has chosen for them. It may seem easier to not make a decision and just do what you’re told, but life is filled with people who end up not achieving their potential and not being who they dreamed of being because they were too busy fulfilling someone else’s vision for them.

By all means seek advice from those you trust, or who have wisdom, but make your own choices. That way, regardless of whether you succeed or fail, at least you have the dignity of knowing you did it on your own terms. And what is failure anyway? In reality it is just the chance to make a new decision! Life can too easily become a seemingly never ending cycle filled with deadlines set by others, in which the only time spent making decisions, is time spent deciding what you don’t have time to do in the day. A bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, we find ourselves lost in someone else’s reality, falling and falling and wondering if it is ever going to end. Or worse, that it won’t end.

But it does end. And haven’t we all been warned by old people we speak to and by the postings that we ‘like’ on Facebook that ‘life is a journey not a destination’ and that ‘or no one wishes they could have worked harder when they are on their death bed’. An unexamined life, so they say, is a life not worth living. So from time to time we need to stop busily rushing around living our life and take the time to examine it. Often this process of examination is something that is forced upon us by our own impending death, illness or impairment, or by the death, illness or impairment of someone close to us. Luckily for me it was something much less dramatic that forced me to examine my life. I have this luxury on my LSL! (Did you know that most Americans only get one week’s holiday a year and have never heard of LSL?)

One starts off thinking it’s is all about having a rest, but LSL for me has become about taking time to think about the journey I am on, reflect on where I have been, where I am going and who I have and will share the journey with. What are the ‘big rocks’ of my life and how do I keep them in the forefront of my thinking so that they guide my decisions and actions and the journey I am travelling? 

I haven’t come up with the blue print for the next ten years but it is a work in progress, so wish me luck.