I’m in my last three weeks at work now before leaving corporate life forever. Even writing that down feels incredibly final after thirty plus years of working!
It’s a bitter-sweet feeling. I’ve worked as an IT Director/CIO for twenty years now, and have never done anything else other than technology and change.
I’ve been privileged to work for some amazing companies during this time.
What’s kept me going all this time has been working within creative media companies, music and book publishing especially, over the last fifteen years. When you love the product that your company produces, and you’re working with like-minded people, it’s easy to stay motivated. Music, art and books have always been my passion.
Having said that, it’s time to hang up the business suit. Metaphorically speaking – it’s a very long time since I actually wore a business suit 😊.
Increasingly over the last ten years I’ve felt a growing sense of weariness with the battle for technology to be recognised as core to company strategy, with long commutes and with long working hours. Husband feels the same. It’s eroding our sanity and increasingly feels empty of worth beyond the paycheck, however necessary that paycheck has been.
We’ve both decided to stop. I’m not going to use the word retirement, but it’s time for us to move to the next phase of our lives. I suspect that the next five years are going to be harder work than either of us have ever experienced, but we both relish the challenge.
For us it’s about a simpler life. Getting off the treadmill and doing something for ourselves. We will be much poorer in monetary terms, that’s a racing certainty, but we’ll be richer in other, more important ways. And we both feel the need for that so strongly.
Building our forever home is going to be hard. We’ll make mistakes, and our bodies aren’t used to daily physical labour. There’s going to be a lot of pain and frustration. But we think that the satisfaction of one day being able to sit in front of the log burner looking out at the view through our big windows over the Sound of Sleat and be able to say “we did this” is something worth striving for.
Nature and the land are also extremely important to us. The island is a beautiful place and we believe that planting trees can only enhance that for both local wildlife and our ourselves. This will be a legacy that we won’t perhaps see to its full maturity, but that which we hope the next generation will reap the benefits of.
We hope someone after us will love the little six acre patch of croft that we will create as much as we will. With its orchards, nut trees, willow beds, rowans, hawthorns and birch groves it will be a special place.
The other thing that I am so looking forward to is growing some of our own food. We’ll have vegetable beds, herb beds and berry beds. We will plant apple and hazelnut trees.
We’ll grow mushrooms on beech logs and keep chickens for their eggs. I will have the time to bake bread and to cook with what we grow and raise.
As well as this, I’m looking forward to spending time exploring my creative side, something that has been suppressed for most of my adult life. We’ve reserved one of the rooms in the house as a small studio for me to create in. I think that being surrounded by so much natural beauty will re-kindle my desire to create again. Whether that’s in clay, on canvas or in textiles I don’t yet know, but I can feel it there, quietly simmering under the surface of my respectability and exhaustion.
These last few months in London are a time of packing, planning and reflection, and of nervousness and anticipation at the magnitude of the change that we’re undertaking.
There’s much uncertainty in the coming years for all of us, but I do know that this is the right thing for us to do.
Ravencroft Skye 