Things wot I have learnt

So now all the drama is over, and I'm back at work ... What has this whole experience taught me?
Well for the first time in my life I had to slow down - and I mean really slow down - and I noticed things I would never have noticed at speed:

• A family of starlings growing from stark grey with eye holes to squabbling adolescents, fighting over a plentiful supply of food
• A haggard blue tit, frantically collecting food for its young ones
• The glorious buzzing of my bee bush... Lying back with my head under it watching the bees collect pollen
• The smell of elderflower which caught my nostrils on a slow hobble round the woods
• The feel of the sun on my skin
• Complicated hybrid roses with many layers of petals
• The fact that other people's hydrangeas were also not blooming yet
• Pleasure in watching my bubble lamp bubble and my trellis lights come on every night
• Saving a bee from a butterfly feeder, and watching it go from almost drowned to cleaning itself, to eating some jam to finally being able to take off again... A good half an hour of study

And so much more that I haven't written down. It has also given me time to think  and to evaluate my work-life balance, and whether I really want to spend every day replying to emails as and when they fly in, or whether I can actually compartmentalise work a bit more effectively and not get distracted by whatever the current request on my attention is. Is there ever an email that can't wait 24hrs to be dealt with?

And finally, I've had the time and space to pursue a dream. For a long time...perhaps even as far back as school age, I have been interested in the idea of becoming a therapist. Having had therapy myself and found it fascinating, I can now see how it would do everyone good to have some - it doesn't matter if we have mental health problems or just don't want to repeat the same unhealthy patterns of interaction throughout our lives. So, I have signed up to a certificate in counselling skills course at York college.... Which is a bridge course to a Post graduate diploma in counselling at York St John. It then takes two years to be professionally qualified and accredited. I haven't been this excited about studying... Well, maybe ever! Of course long term it'll mean changes, and I'm not ready to give up any of my work yet, but I am ready to get the qualification and see where it leads. Sometimes sitting around makes you take action... A bit of an enigma really!

So I'm grateful for this time, although it has been traumatic (in the true sense of the word) and painful at times, I have come out the other side a different person. I now have an understanding of genuinely how long it takes to recover from a general anaesthetic - a good month - and how it was only me who could lay down and stick to boundaries about what work I could and couldn't do during that time (with a bit of brilliant therapeutic support.)

Oh and finally, an update on the hip... Saw surgeon yesterday... Still in more pain than I was pre-operation, but he hopes that in 4 months when I come back I'll be smiling! I was smiling yesterday... But hopefully the smile will be the smile of someone running around, playing tennis and swimming breast-stroke! But for now I'm signing off. It's the holidays, and I can move around enough to enjoy them - hurray!