From being a blog a day kind of guy, I fell into disgrace last week as I only posted once! I have no excuse! Last week was extremely busy and full and yet I have nothing to show for it. Or at least nothing that I can name and display. I will try and make up for it with today’s descriptions of the mayhem.

I had a crisis early in the week. For so long, I have been an island in my problem. There has been almost nobody out there who has shared my frustration about life and my need to make it worthwhile. Part of the problem has been my inability to name the issue. Now that I have named it, I have been able to research it and am amazed at the amount of literature that is available. OK, there is not a huge amount, but there is more than I imagined. This has started to pose a problem for my book and hence my crisis. I started to ask myself why on earth I am trying to write a book where I am not the expert on the subject at all. I am just an unwilling participant. I struggled for a couple of days to word my thoughts but all of my writing lacked soul. In the end, I took an hour out on the couch to ‘think’. In that time of reflection, I was able to see exactly how I needed to write and why it was important for me to write this book. I am not sure if you know that there are 1000 manuscripts submitted to publishers in South Africa each week. The odds of getting your book published are pretty slim. A slight dampener to the outpouring of my soul. The thing is, the way I want to write it now means that it will be written in such a way that I am the expert! You will just have to wait and see or until I have my next book crisis!

With the book crisis at bay for the moment, and my hunger for writing reawakened, I was all set to spout forth the most amazing prose! And then I was asked to present some proposals for project management work in Africa. My whole writing world came to a standstill as I realigned my creative endeavours. I have always been able to put slick presentations together, and they are usually very different. With everything that I have learnt in the last couple of weeks about Photoshop and photography, I suddenly had some alternative creative insight and some serious skills to back it up. Going off on a tangent was called for and so that is what I did. I think I have put together a wonderful presentation but we shall see if it aids us to deliver the goods later this evening! The fulfilling part for me was that this has been the first test of the success of my studies towards my ME degree. I amazed myself at how much progress I have made and this has gone some way to allaying my need to always add visible value!

My mother gave my oldest son some surfing lessons for Christmas. A most Cape Town kind of present. We now go down to the beach on Thursday evenings for an hour and a half. The surf school is run by a good friend of mine and somehow he has promoted me from interested dad to assistant surf coach. This has meant spending a good deal of time in the sea with a bunch of youngsters and gale force winds, a very interesting combination! I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and feel like I am adding some value not only to my son but to a whole heap of youngsters in a sport that I enjoy. Some day as a result of this effort, I hope to spend lots of quality time with my sons at backline languishing in nature and shredding waves with hoots of pure joy!

I severed ties with my old company last week. Thursday was my last official day at work, even though I was on leave. I took back my laptop and cell phone and a number of other gadgets. It was a new experience to park in the visitor’s parking lot. I spent far longer than I expected chatting with old colleagues, but it was great. For me the change in perspective hit home hard. Looking in from the outside, seeing their pain and frustration and with a good deal of relief knowing that I have traded all of that for piles less money and tons of life! One of the ladies that I caught up with gave me a big hug and said that she was enjoying my blog. She added that it was helping many people. I have to say that I was blown away and thoroughly inspired to do far better. Thank you, thank you, thank you! That comment certainly gave me the lift I needed!

And so, now that you know that I have been far too busy with nothing and yet absolutely everything, I hope that you have a productive and fun filled day!