I had dinner last night with a mate and his family. It was wonderful to once again have deep discussions with a good friend. Never have I debated the meaning of life with such intensity and I am amazed at how often this is happening to me. Visiting this friend is very interesting – once you open the door, you enter a whole new reality. Within a minute, I had met Spikey, the new pet Bearded Dragon. Sounds a bit violent for a pet but then this is not your average family. I also got to probe Spikey’s food – amazing stuff - a heaving mass of worms as well as a container full of crickets. I was even invited to chop of the cricket heads as Spikey is not too keen on the heads. He does however like his crickets dipped in a strawberry flavoured power - nothing quite like a strawberry cricket shake! Amazingly enough I did not find myself tempted to try one. With three boys and a girl in the house, conversation ranged from beheaded crickets to soccer to chess with the finale being a premiere of a song for a concert later this week (twice).

This is a special household – strong family values abound here! It is filled with respect and caring and love. These are just a couple of reasons why I thoroughly enjoy coming back to visit. These reasons and the deep philosophical debates that we have ensure that I leave with plenty to think about. My friend is also a truly special person to me in that he is a beacon in a sea of craziness. He is never afraid to ask the hard questions. For instance – am I making this change for selfish reasons? Am I sure that what I am doing is not purely for my own good but for the good of the family? I suppose what he is asking is am I doing this to get a holiday or is my family going to suffer as a result of this decision while I get to do the things I want to do? Tough questions, thanks buddy.

My visit was also a wake up call that I am extremely lucky to be in a position where I can take a chance with my life and do something different as well as have the financial resources to survive for a little while. Not everyone out there has the means or ability to make drastic changes, to do what they want to do. Most are well and truly stuck in life and there are very few options for desired change that are acceptable. Regardless of our life circumstance, we are all capable of asking hard questions of ourselves. We also owe it to ourselves to be honest with our answers. I am privileged and blessed to have a friendship as special as this one.

I am back in Johannesburg. My mother tells me that she has been reading my blog - I am most impressed with her savvy! She did tell me that she thinks that it is ludicrous that I describe myself as going through a pre-mid life crisis. In her mind a mid life crisis involves running from one's family and not towards it. I am afraid that I do not know the answer. I am a man with a mission - hopefully a mission that is not just filled with good intentions but also some serious follow through. I have written a lot about hope but I do hope that I can make a difference and actually do something worthwhile. For now though I need to be content with hope and putting the pieces in place to ensure that when my time and my opportunities come around, I am ready to act!

What is thing that I am going through in my life now? Is it the awakening of my soul or just an error in judgement? I have no idea what to call this period of my life -perhaps I will label it awakening. I hope this will placate my mum!! I certainly like the imagery.....

I have just been for a wonderful run in Johannesburg. There is an Eastern philosophy, although I am not sure what it is called, to which I now subscribe. As I understand it, the spirit gets tired during the day and gets out of balance with the rest of your body. If you get out there and do a bit of exercise, your spirit and body are brought back into harmony with surprising results – plenty of energy! The only problem with this philosophy is that there is no excuse for tiredness, in fact when you are most tired, you should be out exercising – a hard sell to any brain out there!

I have struggled to write anything meaningful for the last couple of days. I can say that I have had an awesome weekend. It all started on Friday when I was offered an awesome job, which I had to turn down. After work I spent some time surfing and broke my 8 week drought of no waves – that was some relief! Luke and I ran 2km at his school fun run on the beach on Saturday morning. It was fantastic to watch the little guy perform. He just kept on giving it his all – I can learn from this. I followed all of this up with some extreme gardening – moving potted plants from one side of town to another. My mother, aunt and uncle then joined us for dinner and then flew home the next morning. We had an easy Sunday which we ended with a walk on the beach and the most spectacular sunset. I had a most blessed weekend and I must say that I am thankful! I would argue that we have an awesome quality of life. Why should I give all of it up for a power job and big bucks?

I think I need to be talking about arrogance – my own. So here goes. I received a comment on this blog (check out Thursday October 25 - Running) and was really warmed by the sentiment that it contained. Here was somebody who had taken the time to read my rantings and then had actually made the effort to respond with some lovely words of encouragement. I had a look last night and replied ending with – ‘I am keen to make it happen - what about you?’ I went to bed last night thinking wow – that was arrogant. Sure I have made a decision to change my life but I sure as hell have not come close to making it work. I have yet to stop work and here I am dispensing throw away advice to other people to get their lives in order. Fact of the matter is, I have to make this change as I understand that my life is not the way it should be. I am not sure when I qualified to be able to give out advice on the lives of others. So to Kelly out there, I hope that I did not offend and I apologise for my arrogance. I certainly have a long way to go to grow into this new life of mine. I am going to have to make a number of internal changes and adjustments in my life and this is just one of them. One day I want to become a humble, loving human being.

My oldest son has a beach run this weekend. I thought that I would take him for some practice runs before we actually hit the beach on Saturday. I would imagine that as a 6 year old, 2km is a pretty major distance! I was amazed at how excited he was to go running with me. I suppose that he has seen me go off running and has thought it pretty cool and so he will get a chance to do what dad does. Yes please, dad the hero! We set off at rather a brisk pace and I was absolutely blown away at the amount of effort he put into his running, he just ran and ran and ran. We did stop a couple of times and at the end he really stepped it up a gear and sprinted for home. Once again I was amazed at how children are able to apply their minds and do things that you would never have thought them capable of. One aspect of my life that I am looking forward to is introducing them to possibilities – I can’t wait to be my children’s biggest fan!

One of the interesting things that happened on the run was that we passed stacks of people. Stacks more passed us in their cars! OK - not that interesting. All the people that saw us immediately realized that we were on a bit of a training run together. Every single one of them ended up with this funny smile on their faces which said “that’s so sweet”. So it may also have been a bit of gas but I like the way I have interpreted it! It certainly gave me that warm feeling that I am doing the right thing, spending real time doing things that my children want to do.

The other interesting thing and completely unexpected consequence of our running training has been the amount of conversation that we have had. We have had 20 minutes of quality talking time on each of runs. I have learnt tons about my boy, about school, about his friends, about what he did, about what he thinks about things, well really just all about his life. If you have young kids, you probably share my frustration in that I cannot get much out of them over the dinner table about their day. Most of these conversations are quite contrived and hardly deep. Now I eagerly await our runs, not for the exercise, but for the gift of getting to know my kids.

One more interesting thing was that I was able to slip into dad the coach mode and my children actually listen. Perhaps their blood is pumping a bit faster with the exercise and this turns on the listening section of their brains – can this be proven as a scientific fact? I think we all found this valuable as many of the coaching lessons that one learns in sport are things that can be applied to life; pace yourself, set some goals, sometimes things are tough – need to work through it, etc.

My youngest son was also dead keen to join us and so we all ran a bit of our route together. If you were wondering, my 3 year old runs 600m with only 1 short walking break – not bad when your legs are shorter than my shin!

I have had toothache for a week. I had some fillings done last week and they seem to have upset the balance in my mouth causing all sorts of exciting secondary complications (sounds good, don’t know what I really mean). I don’t think that I have ever had toothache in my life before. I now understand and can have compassion on those who suffer from the problem. The only tooth pain I have ever had was the result of a flirting injury! For some or other reason I was playing hockey with a couple of girls. A ball was lifted towards the goals and one of the girls took a massive swing, I mean this was a goal she was going to score! Fortunately for the ball, she missed. My front tooth on the other hand took a beating, jumped out of my mouth and lay on the ground in surrender. This random act of senseless violence went rather unnoticed in the media. I mean my tooth died out there on that hockey field. I made a decision there and then that this fledgling romance was not for me. Girl with stick – 1, boy without tooth – 0! So the extent of my tooth pain has been pretty sudden and bloody. This new tooth pain is rather annoying and incessant. I have no doubt that it should be banned together with our Government’s thinking on corporal punishment! Fear not I am tough – I managed to raid my wife’s supply of amazing drugs in the wee hours of the morning. Now I am bulletproof!

My family came over to visit this weekend which was wonderful. Living in 2 different cities, far apart, makes one really appreciate your family when you see them. On a heavier note, my mother told me about a family friend whose daughters have both been diagnosed with an auto immune disease. This is hectic stuff. The one daughter has suffered for some time with the disease but the second daughter has just found out that she has the same thing. The mother is rather upset and I get the feeling that she blames herself for passing on the bad genes that have resulted in this disease. What a sad and difficult situation. Here is my view. I really believe that our children have been loaned to us as gifts from God, and that it is up to us to simply love them. As terrible as the situation is, I cannot see how a mother can blame herself for something she had no control over (I mean who does DNA checks to see if you should have kids before you have kids?). I understand that there are a whole lot of emotions involved and that this is a terrible situation. On the positive side, she has done her best to be a mother to her children for many years. I have no doubt that they are going to both need her more than ever now. I would think that her kids would not have had it any other way, i.e. I got the bad genes but I also got you as a mother. This sounds very much like a live for the moment view (I almost wrote love for the moment – perhaps that is truer!). To take this further, what is more important, that we had life and loved or that we had a long life and loved?

So here I am again on another plane on my way to JHB. This is a part of my job that I dislike intensely. There is only one positive – people you tell about all of your plane travel seem mighty impressed. I am now ready to trade all of this pointless travel for a chair on wheels. One other positive is that I try and make every trip count by visiting family and friends wherever I go. This is fantastic and allows me to see so many people all over the place. Bottom line, I still ache for my own wife and children! I would far rather share these visits to all our friends and family with my family. I suppose you do what you have to do – grin and bear it. Tonight I will join a mate and all of his friends for a poker evening. It should be fun but then again so would a cricket game in front of my garage followed by a family dinner and story time!

What an interesting day! I thought that it would surely be a boring and wasteful one and yet it has given me some great hope! I am back on a plane again – flying back to Cape Town. Should be home late on a Friday night. Back to my day. I joined a national workshop today that debated a whole heap of the implementation issues. The exciting thing is even though I have resigned and I have no emotional attachment to the outcome of this project, I was still able to add value. I am still able to operate and think and I am actually pretty good at this stuff. Don't get me wrong – no major insights provided by me or project changing advice. More importantly I could contribute and could think about all of the issues.

Sitting on a plane is pretty cramped. It does not really lend itself to typing. I suppose that you cannot have everything. Is that also true in life – that we need to choose, as most of us cannot have everything? Perhaps we can have everything, we just need to be clear on what we want. For me I would be very happy to have all of my priorities met. Would that make me happy or would I still want more. When do we stop wanting more and more and decide to be happy with what we have and the moment that we are in. Is this purely a mental space or is this an existence in reality (i.e. we have stuff therefore we are happy)?

There is an ad on TV at the moment that caused me to sit up and listen. The payoff line is :
‘We all want different things because we are all different’. What a lovely advertising claptrap line BUT I do think that there is a serious element of truth here. Here I am waxing lyrical about my way being the right way to deal with your life – take it by the scruff of the neck and shake it all about. Yet not everyone thinks the same way as I do. Not everyone has the same priorities as I do. This was a key insight for me. It amazes me that I have spent 2 years thinking hard and deep about life and yet I still am learning some very simple things.

This life must be about balance. People talk about this all of the time yet I do not think that we have any idea about balance. I believe balance must be dictated by my priorities in life. My first pass at my priorities are :

v My family,
v my spirituality,
v freedom to manage my time.
v job satisfaction,
v fulfillment in that I am adding something back,
v fitness,
v enough money to cover the costs,

Looking at my life; I have very little family time, I battle to relate to my family when I do have the time, my spirituality is mostly neglected, I have zero job satisfaction and I have nothing in my life that creates a deep fulfillment. Obviously there is huge reason to change my life in a big way. Talking about balance – in the past I thought that I was managing the balance BUT when I examined my priorities and compared to what I actually had, the differences are vast. I did have money, power, a high flying lifestyle and respect. None of these things feature in my list of priorities and yet this is what I have been trying to balance with the stuff that I find important in my life. No wonder I was not getting it right at all!!!!

I had a great dinner last night with some people in East London. They were amazed by my decision to leave the corporate world (whilst on a good wicket) and take a rather different path. We had some awesome conversations about all sorts of things. This seems to be happening a lot lately – lots of people seem very happy to have deep philosophical conversations and yet this is something that I have not engaged in at all previously. Was I asleep and living in a world that was real and yet so superficial?

It was great to hear people telling me that this change that I am making is commendable. The thing is it is only commendable if I make it worthwhile. If I am unable to be an amazing father and husband then I have failed. If I am unable to spend time working with the needy, then I have failed. If I am unable to build a new income stream and have to return to the corporate ladder, then sadly I would have failed! This assumes that we have enough to live on and that the focus on income generation is then about excess. This now becomes an interesting debate – how much is enough? What is excess? How am I going to know and how am I going to divide my time to generating enough income and then family and community? How much risk would be too much risk for my family? I have so many questions…..I am sure that in time I will find answers.

I spent some time at the dentist yesterday. It was as much fun as getting two fillings could be. It is all part of my master plan to ensure that I have completed all of the possible admin before leaving the comfort and safety of my employer. The dentist completed the trio of optometrist and medical. I can now see and chew and know to chew more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. What can I say, I am now fully prepared to join the real world.

With a larger than normal jaw, I spent the day at home. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a sick day due to the pain of fillings (what pain?). Rather the appointment was in the middle of the day and it was simpler to work from home for the day. The point of this long and laborious explanation is that working from home was not as easy as I had thought. Can you believe I actually thought it would be a simple adjustment from my office to my home office? I ended my day with a feeling of complete dissatisfaction. I really had not achieved much at all during the day. The worst thing is that I spent the whole day busily working away. My takeout is that I need to manage my own emotional well being. The consequences of having a number of days where you believe that you have added no value must be devastating, especially when your creative endeavor is the writing of a book.

On the positive side – it was great to spend a day around my children. I write ‘around’ due to the fact that I was able to have breakfast with them and chat to them over lunch and then play with them later in the day. I thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of the day.

Another thought that has just occurred to me is that I will need to take the full year off and not think about going back to work if things are not working out the way that I want. It is absolutely key that I take all of the pressure off this next year. This year is about trying to get the skills that I require to be able to rebuild my life. Obviously I want to do as much as I can to get this new (as yet unidentified) venture off the ground as soon as possible. I can see this being an interesting dilemma as I already see myself being successful in a couple of months. If I am honest with myself, I will understand that there is no way that this is going to come right in a couple of months. Once again, I have this elevated and unrealistic opinion of myself. I think that I am going to find myself humbled regularly in this new world!

THE WEEKEND
Hey the weekend was busy in the extreme and filled with some meaningful discussions about work life balance. It was most interesting to hear a number of views on the issue and to realise how many people are currently confronting this issue.

Key is that your life is filled with choices that you make. Sure there are things that happen to you BUT it is your choice how you react to those things (victor / victim mentality I suppose). In this life we choose what is important to us and then we continue to make choices that support those that choice. This leads to an interesting thought - are our lives self fulfilling prophecies? Do we create our own misery and joy through the choices we make on what we think will make us happy? Do we need a far deeper level of self insight to understand ourselves first before we can rationally make these choices and then be fulfilled if we actually ever achieve them? Are we all just confused and is this the reason for the mayhem in our world today? OK so today I have plenty of questions and I am not sure that I will ever have the answers.

An analogy could be that some of our subconscious choices are like a fork in the road, the more we take the one fork, the more the other becomes disused and overgrown until we are unsure if there is a path there or not. In other words we make decisions about our life and we don't even realise that we are making these decisions. Wow deeply philosophical stuff! Is there any subject matter out there on this stuff - surely somebody has written about this in the past?

Today at work 2 promotions have been announced. Both of them are positions that I would have enjoyed getting. Unfortunately I would have had to turn down both of them had I had the joy of having them offered to me as they both would have involved a move away from Cape Town. That may seem a little silly except if you consider that my family is happy! These are not the first that I have had to consider BUT they have occurred under the control of my boss and while they are not in Cape Town, they are close to home. And hence I have been thinking.........



I feel a twinge of regret, this was the position that I have striven to be for many years in this company. with my resignation, it can never be. I was trying to work out why this is important to me. I suppose that I am still ambitious, I still want to be seen to be doing well in the world. In a nutshell I still long for the power and presitge of the position as well as that special entry in my CV. This is very interesting as I well know that I would not earn any more with this kind of move. If I think carefully, power and prestige are mostly transitory concepts - they will not last. As for the entry on my CV - well I hope never to go back into the corporate environment and so hopefully will never need the entry. Yet deep down inside of me, an illogical and emotional part of me is saying it regrets missing this opportunity! I will need to deal with this.



The deision that I have made to carve out a new life for myself and my family is full of positive things. Sure the key negative is that there is NO garantee of any money coming in next year BUT this too is a challenge to myself - can I make it happen? Can I grasp opportunities and make them work for me? This way my family stays happy, networks of friends that we have worked hard to build will remain in place, the kids will remain in good schools where they are doing well, and we get to stay in our wonderful house and neighbourhood. Apart from some of the status quo stuff, my family and I get to spend more time together (hopefully valuable time). I hope that we will grow closer together and I hope that my influence at home will equip my children with the skills they need to grow into good men.



They say that you need to lead by example. This is my example!

Wow – what a morning. I got to work early and have been for a 6km run – awesome awesome awesome. We now have a shower at work and this makes it all possible. That and the fact that I no longer feel the intense need to be at my desk from 06h00 every morning anymore. Oh the joys of being in a resignation period!



I cannot believe how alive I feel today – a run first thing in the morning is something that I have not done in years. I feel liberated and I suppose this is the first of many changes that I will be making in my life in order to make it mine again. I cannot believe how tied up I have been in my companies' business for so many years of my life. I feel like I am breaking free and yet I have never really felt imprisoned. In fact the allure of my job and the trappings of success have pretty much covered up the missing bits. How wrong I might have been – this freedom tastes good and I am keen to drink a whole lot more of it.



I imagine that this freedom also tastes good because I still am living in both worlds - the comfortable salary keeps on coming in and at the same time I am able to make choices that are very different from the choices that I had to make in the past. This honeymoon will only last for 3 months, after that the money concern must come into play and once again guide ones choices (or must it?). The other concern on my mind is that I do not want to drop the many balls at work either. I would think it pretty pointless to burn my bridges when so close to the end and after so many years of hard dedicated work! An interesting paradox that I am going to thoroughly enjoy wading through!

I created this Blog a couple of days ago and have put off this first post. I wanted it to be special and really have some hooks to keep you reading. Alas - none have come to me yet! So here we go....



I am 34 and have been disenfranchised with my life for some time. That's not entirely true; a good part of my life has been awesome, the family and home part. The part that has been a concern for the last couple of years has been my work life. I have felt that there has to be something more that one can expect from life other than working damn hard and then fitting in your family and your passions around your work timetable. I suspect that I am right and after much contemplation have decided to take the bold move into the unknown - I have resigned!



This has not been an easy step. After all, earning a fantastic salary, having a really cool job, huge amounts of power and plenty of perks and giving all of this up for, well not sure yet. I suppose it is all in the pursuit of a dream. At work you hear the overused term "work / life balance". There is plenty of lip service to this issue BUT there is no real possibility of it happening. And so I am on a path to create my own balance. Hopefully a path that will allow me to build a new life around my family, my passions and a bit of community time. It's all rather pie in the sky at the moment and hence the reason for this blog - this is my journey to finding the truth on the other side. Can you give up everything, take a leap of faith and land in Utopia? Follow me and we shall see.