This has been rolling around in my head for awhile now.
Monet paintings are composed of thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny dots. From a distance, it is beautiful. Up close, it’s downright ugly.
This seems to apply to a number of situations, like this move.
From Chicago, it was beautiful. Mountains. And…um…mountains. Distance from family, both a positive and a negative. A place where I know no one, and no one knows me, also positive and negative. Commuting and being an #officedrone, again positive and negative. From afar, like a Monet painting, Vancouver was beautiful.
Up close, it’s downright ugly.
Being an unknown is literally like being born. No identification. No money. No nothing. Getting setup is a time-consuming hassle. #officedrone is fitting as the commute and office grind quickly lose the newness and become dull and boring. The weather is horrific. It rains. Daily. I keep hearing “it will get better” but it is always “it will” and not “look, it is!” Always future tense, never present tense. I have my doubts. The dred of getting up in the morning that I forgot about as a #freelancer returns and is hard to shake. The total lack of friends leaves me adrift. If not for some fantastic office mates, I’d be in dire straights.
And this got me thinking.
I’m too close to the Monet. All I see are the ugly dots, not the whole picture, so it isn’t what I had envisioned from the distance of Chicago. None of it, actually, has been as I envisioned. And I have, more than once, thought about packing it in and going back to Chicago. Or even just packing it in and going back to the States.
I’m too close to the Monet.
But Chicago is also too far. I can look at the Monet from Chicago, see its beauty and move on. There’s nothing to capture and sustain my interest. There are more interesting things to focus on in Chicago than this particular Monet, so I look at them, and investigate other opportunities.
The challenge, then, is to find the right distance so it’s not so ugly up close, but also not so uninteresting from afar.