Back to work: joy or pain?

Taking a break from work has always been a problem for me. This year, however, I have focused on one very important thing.

I practice Linguistic Empathy and I expect you to do the same. Please bear with me if my English is not perfect. Read the Italian version here.

28th of August is the day I have chosen to go back to work. I will start with two coaching sessions, and will continue with an intercultural training for an English couple moving to Italy. The following week, the Expatclic webinars and online meetings also resume.

I feel truly regenerated. This year I really disconnected. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Beyond the boundless desire to enjoy my sons, home and friends, I really felt a rejection towards the computer. I only approached it sporadically and only to do necessary operations, such as paying bills or sending important emails.

My friends congratulated me. My reading was reinvigorated. I have discovered a lot of beautiful places in Tuscany. I did yoga every single morning, and I spent quality time with all the guests who passed through here.

I was so well that at the prospect of going back to work I did not feel, as I often did in the past, that excitement and expectation in the face of something you love, and which you have been missing.

Indeed, perhaps for the first time since I resumed a career, I felt that subtle sense of duty that, according to many, accompanies the end of the holidays and the moment of going back to work.

Yet I love my job. I never get tired of it. Connecting with other human beings and helping them fills me with immense joy. Communicating with diverse people, exchanging emotions and experiences, has always been something priceless for me. Managing a community, with all its ups and downs, is something that pays me back every day for all the hard work. Playing – the tool I’ve successfully introduced into my work lately – is one of the things I NEVER get tired of doing.

Wait.

I have never stopped doing all this during summer! I spent over two months in my lovely little house surrounded by my closest community – sons, husband, son-in-law, we’ve never spent longer periods under one roof. I welcomed dozens of friends, and with all of them there were wonderful exchanges of emotions and stories, a lot of sharing. I helped many friends – some who came to visit here at the Casina, others far away, with advice and information.

How about playing? I haven’t stopped for a minute. I played with my children and husband every day, sometimes even for hours in a row, as if there was no tomorrow. But I also played with the guests: Dixit, Lupus in Fabula, Tarot, Scattegories and loads of other games that I didn’t know about and that were introduced by our friends.

The moral, which has never appeared so clear to me, is this: I do a job that channels and honours my values, my passions, the things I love the most and that are important to me. These things I kept doing while shutting down the computer and taking a break from paid work. I kept doing them because they are the engine of my life.

And I am not surprised, therefore, that I have not missed my work. I felt very strongly that work is nothing more than a different expression of what fills my life with meaning, of what matters to me. Of what I am, always, anyway and every day.

That’s why going back to work doesn’t excite me particularly but it doesn’t weigh on me either. I will continue to do what matters to me in life.

See you online!

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