Pissing in the wind.

At my parents house there are rainwater tanks and there is a hose that’s directly connected to them and the water that comes out of that hose is the sweetest water that I have ever drunk.

I recently quite my job, left after five and a half years in a mixture of shame and disgust, shame at myself not being as good at my job as I thought I was, disgust at the company I worked for, the reasons too numerous and petty to name. I received a pay out of my annual leave and with no real plans or discernable directions in the future, I set off. I didn’t go anywhere, I haven’t travelled, I’ve made a few plans and spent some quality time with friends and I’ve woken up every morning wracked with anxiety over being unemployed.

On the other hand, I’m on a wonderful holiday. I have spent a week at my parents house, seeing parts of my family that I haven’t seen in ages, visiting the places of my childhood and walking down roads that I haven’t walked for nearly 20 years. I pick fresh fruit from trees as I walk past them and blackberries from the mountainous bushes that grow everywhere. They are not quite in season yet, but they are getting there.

Everyday that I spend in the country makes it harder for me to want to return to the city. I keep thinking about the concrete and then I look out the window and all I can see is green. If I wanted to I could lean out and pick one of the plums off the tree, right now the tendrils of a fern are hanging over the screen of my laptop. There is life everywhere here, you can hear it singing in the trees and scurrying through the undergrowth. Last night I went outside and looked up at the night sky and saw the stars as they deserve to be seen. Other people have described it better than me, and they were right. It was beautiful.

Unemployment is a funny one, I have almost started to relax but not quite fully. I think everyday about what it is that I want to do with my life, with my career. I have been trying to help my parents around the house, doing all those little jobs that they have been meaning to do. Everything I try my hand at I consider as an occupation. I was painting a wall and I caught myself thinking, ‘I could be a painter’. I went to lunch with my mother and one of her clients, my mother is a community carer and I had never really seen what that entails. We sat there and had lunch and I listened to a lady with dementia and tried to follow her as she switched subjects mid sentence, and I thought to myself, ‘I could be a carer.’

Sorry, I just had to take a break to pick some salad from the veggie garden. I pulled carrots from the earth and ate them. The day is beginning to cool and I looked around at the trees swaying in the breeze. I thought about the water in the tank, even though it had sat in the sun all day it was still deliciously cool. It was as cold as a running stream, I thought about the rivers in the area, about the top end of Australia and how when I was a kid there was still such things as swaggies. I thought about rainbow trout and clear fresh water streams and I thought to myself ‘I could catch a fish’.