Garden Leave, Day 1

Garden Leave is a term I'd never heard of before until a friend was on it. I believe its primarily a banking industry term where when you leave your job, you're still paid for several months and not allowed to start your new job to, in theory, lose that competitive edge. I think it's a funny rule, somewhat like the penalty box in hockey (the adult "time out").

I'm on my version of Garden Leave before I start my new job though realized last night my approach to it could use some improvement. Yesterday after a nice morning of sitting on the roof, in PJs, watching boats, and listening to birds chirp I felt that nagging urge that I should be 'doing something.' I then proceeded to have a day of paying bills, running to the phone store, going to both the dermatologist and dentist (even my dentist laughed at that) and then going to two department stores. After a day in midtown I was ragged and experiencing the opposite of La Dolce Vita, and the opposite of being still.

All day a friend had been trying to send me the final episode of Oprah that I missed, and of course it arrived right on time. Excerpts of the transcript are here and among the many messages she said what clicked with me most was this:

""I have felt the presence of God my whole life. Even when I didn't have a name for it, I could feel the voice bigger than myself speaking to me, and all of us have that same voice. Be still and know it. You can acknowledge it or not. You can worship it or not. You can praise it, you can ignore it or you can know it. Know it. It's always there speaking to you and waiting for you to hear it in every move, in every decision. I wait and I listen. I'm still—I wait and listen for the guidance that's greater than my meager mind. The only time I've ever made mistakes is when I didn't listen. So what I know is, God is love and God is life, and your life is always speaking to you. First in whispers. ... It's subtle, those whispers. And if you don't pay attention to the whispers, it gets louder and louder. It's like getting thumped upside the head, like my grandmother used to do. ... You don't pay attention to that, it's like getting a brick upside your head. You don't pay attention to that, the whole brick wall falls down. That's the pattern I've seen in my life, and it's played out over and over again on this show. .."

So Day 2 of Garden Leave will be different. And I think staying up on the deck and just being still for a while is going to be more 'productive' than anything I created on my To Do list....