Monday 3 June 2013

Losing the Good Plates

I bet you thought I'd left the blog to fester and die the death of a thousand bot impressions.

In fact it's been on my mind for the past couple of months, but I haven't been able to write a post because, well ... I like to write about what's on my mind, and what's been on my mind has been engineering a return to Canberra, but that's not really the sort of thing I was comfortable publishing in a public forum where work colleagues and supervisors can see it before we're ready to talk about it.

Now that a secure job has been snared, I can wind up this little blog and draw a nice metaphorical line under it.

Yes, it's a definite end to the "Good Plates" blog. There are a couple of reasons for this.

I started the blog as a way to stretch my writing legs, and it has certainly served that purpose. Along the way I discovered that I wasn't much motivated to write unless I was writing for an immediate audience, which is a bit of a handicap for someone who's trying to work out whether they should be considering writing as a career. So there's one reason.

Another is that this is a blog about this adventure of ours, venturing out of our comfort zone and into deepest, darkest central Victoria. That adventure is coming to an end and so it is logical to me to not keep blogging under this title.

This is not to say I haven't enjoyed putting together these posts.  Looking back over them I'm pretty happy with the thoughts and turns of phrase I've been able to generate, and the positive reaction they've been able to provoke.  One, in particular, keeps coming back to me.  The one in which I referred to some friends who moved away from Canberra, tried to move back and failed, so moved away again.

I know it could seem odd to some people we know, to up sticks and move interstate, for apparently no very good reason, and then to turn around after slightly less than two years and come back. But we feel we've achieved some important things, and that it hasn't been an exercise in futility.

We've confirmed that our hearts are very firmly in Canberra.

We proved to ourselves that we weren't trapped in any place, that we could make a choice, step off that ledge and have an adventure. Not knowing "what could have been" might have been the thing that smothered us in the end. Knowing where we belong now is a more comforting and valuable thing than it could otherwise have been.

The central theme of this blog has been to take advantage of what you have before you and not miss a chance to savour your Sunday best. "Using the good plates" means not letting the things you value most gather dust.

I hope you'll agree that it's worth taking the chance that enjoying the thing you value most might result in losing it.