the fire evens out

You know there was a time, at the point when I begun my professional life as a young student volunteer for a non-profit organisation to my time with the UN to my time with a private equity firm, to two years ago at a sports marketing agency to even 6 months ago with the my current start-up experience when- there wasn't a work-life differenciation. A 7am start meant a compulsory checking of email, a dogged and determined view that a workplace conversation could happen anyday and at anytime. I scoffed at those who yelled work-life balance at the top of their lungs, I cynically looked down upon senior peers who boasted about being able to switch off their blackberries.

I used to ask ..why? How can you not love your work? How can you not want to be running at full throttle 24/7 balancing the brilliance that is professional ambition, success and challenge with the bitter-sweet of life and it's highs and lows. I was a rock with an insatiable appetite for mach3 speeds in the goals that I thought made me who I was in the atmosphere that egged me in further, faster, higher, stronger.

See and that's the the beauty of life. It lets you build your fantasies, your mind-sets and your opinions before laying brick walls of such enormity, of such intimidatory quality - that it forces the DNA that defines your personality to challenge its existence. It forces you to believe you're wrong and re-approach everything you've believed in. This change, it says, can be self-driven or forced upon you. That's where winners lie. In the thin but clearly visible gap between survival and defeat.

These past few months I've been forced to change. I've come face to face with an increasing desire to balance life, to turn that phone off at 6pm, to be comfortable with not checking emails in the dead of the night worrying about the best solution to a problem I know isn't mine. I'd rather make time for that conversation with a friend, that help a parent might need, that movie I might have missed and that song that's left unheard. Yet, in my heart of hearts I know that I miss those old days. Simply because I knew that I lived life to the extreme with the knowledge that I brought value to everything I did professionally whilst striving to maintain a balance personally. I succeeded more often that not because both goals were within my grasp. I know that at this point in my life, despite the seemingly decent value I add, this just isn't mine. I used to hurt from the protracted and disconnected feeling this 'act' would bring, now I am just plain numb. It is time to take some big decisions. Phenomenal opportunities that I have worked tremendously hard for knock on the wooden door of deservedness. Do I have the courage to embrace them with open arms and return to the days of wonder? Or do I continue to be enslaved by a demon that wants nothing but to suck the very soul of my brilliance in an effort to achieve its own, undeserved end?

I have the courage and I have the answer. It lies before me.