Willing the Phone to Ring

Even yesterday, at the beginning, another reminder of what I am looking forward to, and what happened last time, and time to be ready for it.

The sense of not being involved anymore.

I remember this most vividly from The Firm. Suddenly, I went from 10-20 phone calls and 40-50 e-mails a day to virtually nothing. A little bit at first, of course, catching up with people, redirecting projects and so on, but then it rapidly falls away until you physically have to force yourself not to check your mailbox every 10 minutes because you know, in your heart of hearts, that there is nothing new.

Your first reaction to this void is to start calling and e-mailing your friends, following up with them – and then you realize that although they are your friends and although they do care, in fact they still have jobs and lives to attend to. They cannot fill the void left by coworkers or clients or projects.

Your need to talk, to be engaged and active and involved, is still there: it’s just that those things aren’t.

As I indicated, this already raised its head yesterday – and I had to reign myself in from calling one more time, or e-mailing one more time. That’s where, I suspect, the importance of a list is so critical: rather than fumbling about waiting in front of the screen as it refreshes your e-mail box, you go on to the next thing.

Probably too, it’s that we don’t like to spend a lot of time with ourselves. Too much self examination, that sort of thing. The irony is, that taking the time to go through the self-examination can be a project all its own, its discoveries as interesting (to myself, anyway) as any project I had going (filing, anyone?) and certainly more profitable in the long run.