Pause

For the next glorious week: no client meetings; no racing to get a presentation finished on tiime; no suits, ties and hotels; no airports or tubes or train strikes; no hundred emails each and every day; no 5.35am alarms; no Pret sandwiches and lattes; no spreadsheets and benchmarks and performance reviews and catch-ups and difficult phone calls and market indices and underperforming fund managers and liability cashflows and funding levels... In fact, no work.  Time to empty my head of all the endless data and strategies, and just think about all the good things in life, and maybe make some of them happen.

Some people seem to be themselves only when they are working, I am the other way about.  For most weeks of the year, I'm surrounded by people who are trying to get on, to advance their careers because they haven't yet arrived at the place where they want to be, the place that they see as their own, somewhere in the future.  I've now been there, where I wanted to be, for a good few years.  For a lad who grew up in the deep rural landscape of Exmoor, whose first full-time job was using a billhook and a bow saw to rid an overgrown pine forest of undergrowth for a 17 year-old's agricultural wage, I reached the acme of my working life one day in 2008, when I became a managing director at one of the biggest investment companies in the world.  Not exactly rags to riches, I don't think I was in rags to start with and I can't say I have amassed substantial material riches now, but an interesting journey nonetheless.  And since, whilst I've certainly got better at what I do, my only ambition in my work for the last several years has been just that, to get better at what I do.

And one day in the not too distant future, I'll stop, and (I tell myself) I'll become me again.  A me with wide horizons, with the same questioning mind that I always had, but concentrating on some very different questions - the ones I haven't had time to reflect on because my head has been full of all the paraphenalia that goes with maintaining ones place at a high level of effectiveness in a chosen career.  I hope I find that the "me" I think I am is still there!  Maybe it will take a little while, a few months, more perhaps, to find my "self" again, but whatever, or whoever, I am now, I will find out.

The trouble with working in the city environment is that everything moves very fast.  And when I'm at home, and trying to appreciate things that move slowly - plants growing for instance - I have little patience.  My timeframe is very short.  I know that in a day or three at most, I will need to get on a train and go back to that whirlwind of activity that is the office, and so it nags at me when I'm doing something that isn't going to yield instant results.  When my timeframe is based on the seasons, rather than a two or three-day weekend, I think that my perspective will begin to change.  To end the day, tired but with a job not finished, and to know that there's no rush, I can finish it tomorrow, or the next day, or if I want I can do something completely different tomorrow, that is real life.

I reflect on that already a lot, when I get the time.  We (those of us who spend our days in that square mile, and many others in many other places I'm sure) see very little of life as it really exists.  We focus on the urgent things, on the important things that need to be done.  But in any real human framework, are they either urgent or important?  The term "work-life balance" is widely used, but all it really seems to mean for most people is having enough time over from work left in their week to do all the other things that need to be done.  The "life" in that balance is for most people the routine of home-life, looking after children, doing household chores, finally earning the right to drink the odd glass (or bottle) of wine with their partner before falling into bed in the sure knowledge that they haven't left themselves enough time to get the sleep they need before it all kicks off again tomorrow.  And all that for what?  To buy an overpriced house because it is within commuting difference of the office, to run a car that doesn't embarrass them in front of their friends, to eat in expensive restaurants because that's an accepted form of entertainment for those with their status in life...  And the only way they can truly relax is to take a fortnight's holiday somewhere else, where they don't have all those things to worry about, only how they're going to clear it off the credit card at some point in the future.  And they still take their blackberry along with them and buy the FT to read beside the pool...

Whenever someone at work asks me if I saw some article or other in the weekend FT, I just give them a friendly smile and say no.  Until a couple of years ago, I didn't even know that there was a weekend FT, but I keep that to myself.