Category: Life Management

Things I have learned from being retrenched (twice)

In 2002 I was at last pregnant.

After two years of fertility treatment, we had done it. Things were going well. We owned our own house, our relationship was strong, I had a good job. I was worried about how I was going to manage a baby and a career but I thought I would figure it out.

That was not how it was going to pan out, though.

At about the six or seven months mark of my pregnancy, I found myself in the boss’s office being told that my job was being made redundant. I was given a good package and a generous baby shower, and shown the door.

My therapist was a little unsympathetic, pointing out that being retrenched was not as bad as, say, losing a baby. With hindsight, she was of course right.

But retrenchment is not nothing, either. Continue reading

Decluttering – a new trick learned

In August 2021, I used the Women’s Day weekend to declutter and tidy our house. Then, over the course of a year, piles of invisible objects gathered again.

(In our house, the phrase “invisible objects” means things that have been lying around for so long that they are no longer seen).

So I spent this year’s Women’s Day weekend covered in dust and filled with feelings of self-satisfaction.
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Nope, you can’t have everything (and that means everyone)

The question of electricity (and where it comes from) has been much on the minds of South Africans lately.

Ongoing entrenched problems at the nation’s power utility mean we suffer from “load shedding” – rotational power cuts, aimed at preventing the national grid from collapse. (There’s a good explainer here).

The latest round of these power cuts happened at around the same time as sustained international news coverage of COP26 and the climate crisis.
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Life’s compasses: What I learned from Star Wars

If you type the words “life compass” into Google, a remarkably similar set of results appears. From blogs, to life coaches, to organisations, there are many people and institutions offering to help people navigate change, and find their way through challenges.

I’m not promising anything so big. I just want to write about the things that are my life’s compasses, and the directions they have sent me in, with the hope that some of the things I have learned will be of help to other people.
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