Monday 6 April 2009

First day of work experience.....and I love it.

Today was my first day of work experience on a trade magazine. I was due to collect a guy from the college who is also doing work experience on another magazine by the same publisher. If I say I will be there at for 8am I am there...but he wasn't. I called the number..no reply. I hung around for a while and then thought, that's the length of time I am waiting, so I set off. It was a lovely drive and it was in the same direction as where I went for my work experience before so my sat nav didn't have to work too hard to re-direct me when I took wrong turns.

I had just arrived when I got a text message from the guy I was meant to collect saying that he was at the meeting point and wondering what had happened.....aagh....this is terrible. There is nothing that I could do I was at my work experience place. I called him and we had 15 minutes of analysis as he tried to tell me that he had been where we had agreed to meet at 8am as agreed. I pushed down the bad feelings I had because I had been there from 7.45am and he wasn't there at 8am. It turned out he had no credit on his phone so all the messages I left for him to say that I was here, and then I was leaving, went to someone else's phone. When he said this I completely turned off and said well, I can't do anything about it now. We arranged to meet again tomorrow so now I'm a bit apprehensive. I realise just how much I do things on my own and so when I have to think about someone else I get more stressed.

I started on my work experience and was given a couple of stories to write from press releases. I experienced one moment of blind panic when I saw it was about some new technology to improve the quality of a food. But this passed and my natural love of and for words came back and I really enjoyed putting a story together. I did it very quickly and told the assistant editor that I had done it and it was 200 words, this was in less than a 1/2 an hour. I never know whether I should take longer or less time to do work. In my experience in the past being too quick even if accurate is not so good, it puts pressure on others.

I realised again how much I love writing and tomorrow I am going to interview the managing director of a company and this includes taking photographs so I'm adding photography to my repertoire of skills and I'm so excited about it. I don't know what the future is going to bring but I am clear that finally being true to myself and doing what I want to do has given me a new love and enthusiasm for life. I talked about this blog and my book yesterday and out of it met a woman who turned out to have gone on similar meditation retreats as me in India and studied and practiced the same method of meditation. I realised how alive I come when I speak about this whole area and what it has given to people. Then I spoke to another person who had a powerful experience when he was younger. But he turned his back on the experience and became an atheist and now he is returning again to the experience and what it means for him and his life now. Yesterday was such an inspiring day.

Then I came home and to my absolute delight saw I had a comment from Harry. It was the perfect end to a perfect day......