The relativity of weight
For any readers who Google-surfed here, expecting a blog on ‘your body is beautiful just the way it is’, sorry! That’s not the kind of weight I’m talking about. Frequent readers of this blog know they won’t find that kind of writing here, anyway.
(Although I do think that every body is beautiful just the way it is, provided its owner takes loving care of it and enjoyes living in it — but that aside.)
So, weight, then.
‘Won’t the commute be too heavy?’ I was asked seven years ago, during the application rounds for a job at the organisation I am currently still working for but will be leaving mid-April. The mentioned commute was about two hours, one way: from a small town with little public transport to the center of Brussels. The offices weren’t located in a spot that was by no means unreachable, but still a twenty-minute walk from the nearest of Brussels three main train stations (or about the same amount of time by train, if you caught your connection and the trains actually ran — always a bit of a bet in Belgium).
Back then, I shook my head firmly — heavy, not at all. I really wanted the job.
It was indeed managable, it turned out, when I started doing it two or three times a week. It was a bit of a hassle, but I was willing to take that in stride. It made for long days, though: I was easily gone from home for twelve full hours. (For those of you who don’t know the Belgian work environment very well: nine-to-five is a standard for a lot of people (in which we work very hard and perform as much work or more than people in countries where work hours are longer but the work rhythm is less efficient or more relaxed), and we try to live close to our jobs.) It was one of the reasons why I worked only 2,5 days out of five.
By the end of the year, when my temporary contract was coming to a close and I’d had my fill of the job it referred to, the commute had indeed begun to weigh. I experienced it like a true weight, and a burden.
But then a job vacancy appeared, for the same organisation, one floor up in the same building. Journalist and editor. That was what I wanted. I had had a tast of it and loved it. It was the kind of work that made me happy. I applied and got the job.
That’s when something strange happened.
As little as two or three days into my new job, I felt something was fundamentally shifting. A week earlier I had biked to the bus stop with a deep sigh and a lot of willpower; waited in the cold for the overcrowded and uncomfortable bus; got on the train; got on the connecting train, which included more waiting and shivering; to finally walk into the office about two hours later.
Now, barely days later, that same commute didn’t weigh anything anymore. Literally: nothing. Nothing had changed in any objective or physical sense, but suddenly I got on my bike whistling and sat on the bus with a big smile on my face.
It became clear almost immediately: if the reward waiting at the end of the ride (in this case: a job that filled me with deep joy) was worth it, I was capable of taking a lot in order to get there. Smiling. Weight is an absolute relative thing. It only depends on what is lying on the other half of the scales.
I also, at once, made a mental note — once coaching-trained, always alert: the moment that this commute, for whatever reason, would start to weigh again, an internal alarm needed to go off, and I should recognize it as a signal that something was wrong. I fervently hoped this would never happen.
Some very nice years followed. The work was uplifting, my life bloomed in several ways. Commuting time expanded rather than diminished, but I made sure I was always carrying a good book and my own work to keep me company. Quite a few Sapligs were conceived in train compartments. I started looking forward to the commute as a form of quality time. Granted: quality time with frequent delays, occasional complications and still way too much human presence in too close a vicinity of my hypersensitive nerves, but still. As human beings, we enjoy creating rituals. Getting on the train with a cup of mediocre coffee to write and think for about an hour soon became one of my favorite rituals.
After a while, thanks to an electrical bicyle, I even enjoyed cycling the full six miles to the train station. It also freed me from three quarters of the time spent waiting, shivering and bored, and to say goodbye to the loathed bus. Good for my morale and my physical condition both, and a major win-win.
And then, the job itself changed. Rather drastically.
There were no bad intentions involved, and for different reasons, seen from a specific organisational perspective, it all made perfect sense. But from one day to the next I lost the job that had for years filled me with joy. Every compomise I made, felt like a deep loss.
I gave it some time. Every few months I drew up a balance. How was I doing? What was bothering me, what was bringing me joy? The situation remained ‘changeable’, to quote the weather man. But I am faithful by nature, so I was willing to sit through a series of showers and wait for better times.
Only, it felt like it didn’t stop raining at all. To the contrary, it became gradually clearer that what was once a heart-warming boulevard had turned into a dead-end alley. Bit by bit my professional joy withered. It happened slowly, for I certainly didn’t want to feed the nagging negative voices inside my head. But when I noticed, early on in the year, how the six-mile bike ride and the hour on the train were beginning to feel like a burden, I knew I had reached a marker.
I am no foolish dreamer. I tend to make choices I know to be sensible or at least feasible. But there is one bit of wisdom that has been engraved for years above my proverbial fireplace: life is too short to walk it burdened by useless weight.
In four weeks my commuting to Brussels will be over. That is a whole lot sooner than I once thought or hoped. But I accept it for what it is. I am grateful for the wonderful years I have had and grateful for whatever is coming next, even though it is all but clear where the path that I have chosen is headed.
I do, however, feel lighter already.
