Transition: Work

To pay my bills, fund my coffee addiction and enable cocktail meetings with friends, I have a day job.  Too often, it has felt like a day & night job for all the thinking about it that I do.  I have now officially been in the corporate world for 7 years, which is exactly 6 more than I was planning.  Turns out, it can be a fairly inoccuous way to make a living, occasionally interesting, often frustrating, but has worked fairly well for me (minus the crazy-making managers I've had in the past number of years).  Well, things are a-changing in my work life, ready or not: my job in leadership learning & development will no longer exist in its current form come the end of the year.  In the meantime, I have been "mapped" to a "transitional manager" and "selection" will commence next month for who is staying and who is going (such friendly vocabulary, no?).  Which means I have at least one more month of ambiguity (following what has already been, oh, five months?) until my fate is determined.
    I am lucky: I don't have kids, I don't have a mortgage, I don't have financial obligations much beyond the usual bills and a student loan.  So the risk of losing my job is not as great as some of my fellow colleagues. I have witnessed friends being laid off from my company and doing extraordinary things after, traveling literally all the way around the world.  For months now I've been contemplating the dreamy possibility of being laid off and taking some dedicated time to write.  It was a goal I listed in my To Do Before I Turn 40 list: take a year off to write.  I might be given just that opportunity.
    Which is why I'm freaking out about it.
    With reality getting ever closer, my daydreaming turns to practicality and good old fashioned self-sabotage.  There is a part of me, that if given the choice, would choose the safe route: a job, any job.  Now, I honestly may find next month that I don't even have a choice of any kind, but all I've got right now is ambiguity, so I'm running through all the possible outcomes in my mind, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (actually, I should write that book - Choose unemployment, Turn to page 43).
     This is currently the really big change in my life, the question of what will happen with work.  I have another, really awesomely delightful change that's about to happen: I'm about to become an aunt!!  My beloved brother and sister in law are having a baby any second now.  I am sooooo excited for them, and for me too.  Changes like these are the opportunity to grow, to choose who we want to become.  Sometimes it helps when life decides for us that it's time to get going with that change.