stability

After being a professional student (whatever that means) for a larger part of the year, my female owner started to reminisce about the working life she left behind.

The stability of workload – no matter how busy she was, she could leave her work behind after she left her office. Clear boundaries.

The stability of her schedule – related to the former point, she could plan personal activities in advance and know that unless some major incident happened, she could pursue her personal interests. Now, her life is centred around her clients and her coursework is centred around the leftover time after fitting in clients and her research is peripherally arranged around the small pockets of time after clinic and coursework. And her social life is, well you guessed it, impromptu-ly arranged at best.

Having said that, there were times when her life was interrupted rudely by some major incidents. e.g. being activated on her birthday because of the Asian Tsunami, or being activated when she just started chilling out at a watering hole because of a sea accident, or having to perform crisis intervention for a sudden death incident when she was going through a personal crisis herself (okay, that was when I was ill, my fault). That instability within an otherwise stable worklife was something which she couldn't appreciate after a while. But I know it was not because of the instability per se. It was how work was "unstable-ly" distributed among her colleagues during crises.

The stability of her social network – there was always a consistent group of friends in the office she could turn to, in times of boredom and frustration. Because everyone in the course is so caught up with her own work, you hardly get beyond the cursory hello.

The perks – the buffet of development trainings and conferences which she had easy access to, which also provided valid reasons not to work. Now, she has to pay for the extra trainings she is interested in and wonder about the time lost

The stability of an income is certainly a plus. But not having a stable income also helps her to identify what is really essential for survival and it really boils down to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – physical needs like food, water and shelter. Everything else, like booze and dining out are bonuses. She would much rather have health and peace in her life (including her loved ones).

Me too. Health and food and love are good enough.