(no subject)

[katallison]

I've been trying to type up a grand summative entry about 2007, but you know what? Ta heck with it. Thumbnail sketch: after three years of ineffectual sitting and dithering, 2007 was the year I quit a job I hated, left a university I'd been part of most of my life but with which I'd grown disenchanted, ended a fifteen-year relationship, left a house I'd lived in for seventeen years, divested myself of two-thirds of my worldly belongings, and departed from the city and region that had been my home for half a century, to move halfway across the country and begin a new life.

The factoids themselves are not all that interesting; the emotional states associated with them might be rather more so, but I don't know that I have enough understanding of them yet to write them up. What I do know right now is: I have no regrets for having done any of this, though life just now is a bit more precarious than the ideal. I do have some regrets for how I handled some of the departures and endings, but I have no doubt that making the move was the right thing to do.

And one other thing I do know: 2007 was a testimonial to the fact that action (even if imperfectly executed) trumps sitting and dithering. This is a lesson I've never been able to really get a handle on, being, apparently, deeply and intractably sit-and-dither-prone. But insofar as I have resolutions in mind for this year, they coalesce vaguely around that whole action thing, in many forms and directions. Yeah.

Comments

[blacksquirrel.livejournal.com]

Well done you! It's not even so much the action thing as the change of direction thing that really inspires me about your transitions this year.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm eager to see where this all will end up, at least in the short run. Currently I am *vigorously* cursing the wet-cement-like slowness of academic hirings, but you know that as well as I, so... (*rueful shrug*).

And I hope '08 brings you great new opportunities and rewards!

[blacksquirrel.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, it's a constant challenge to explain academic hiring. I have relatives who I have to re-explain the process to every time I see them.

Thank you for the good wishes - all the best to you as well in the new year!