I was talking to a friend the other day about leaving a situation behind and how if you don’t do it clean it will always come back to haunt you.  We were talking about relationships and as we were talking I kept thinking about work situations.

I also has to confess to them that I was smoking again and it was because I hadn’t left clean – I thought just one more time for old times sake, as a bit of a celebration of going 5 months without a cigarette…..  Yes, well that didn’t work out so well.  The break has to be clean and forever.

But, with smoking I came up with reasons for myself that were, and still are valid; but somehow emotionally they had not become a part of me, but just something I was doing for the time being.  (You can read about them in Better Stop Smoking).

I told my friend about my failed attempt (about my 10th) and said that I had not broken clean and remembered why I had left smoking behind – I think these sort of things are things that we have to remind ourselves of daily.

Stay or Go

Also the reasons for leaving anything have to be valid for them to be maintained.  Nothing worse than discovering later that your reasons for doing something were as invalid as the doing in the first place and possibly caused more damage than the original behaviour; although this may not completely apply to smoking – any reason to give up smoking I think is valid!

So the questions about staying or going or leaving something are a good start to deciding that choice AND if it is the right choice.  Try these:

Is this all just a bad fit for me.
I am a great believer is saying if it doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.  I always wonder a people saying ‘it didn’t feel right, but…..’

The people you are with have written you off
I think this follows on from the above in that you can usually feel this.  It is like the kids 18th Birthday – they don’t want you there.  In addition it may not be intuition it may be that they have told you!

I’ve written off this mob
It is often something we do, but hang around anyway.  It is also one of those situations that if it is accompanied by the one above, to use today vernacular…. awkward!

I’m treading water
Nothing more to learn here and it can often feel as if hanging around is actually making you dumber.

Nothing to see here
I’m looking around, trying my best, but, really, there is nothing about this that I really like.  Tolerance is not enough – see above about being written of and writing them off.

It makes me sick
And I mean literally.  The thing about this is it often makes those around you feel sick as well – dragging everybody else down, especially friends and loved ones is just sharing your pain.

Had a good day today – so!
I have a saying about doing worthwhile work.  If you can’t see anything worthwhile in what you are doing, and from what you understand nobody else appears to be able to either – Bye!

Is it toxic
I suppose it is something we often don’t notice until we realise I hate them, they hate me, it is shit, it’s making me sick and really, what the fuck was I thinking (this really applies to smoking!)

A few years ago I was in a situation that fulfilled all of the above requirements but was there for years.  I read a book called “Who Moved My Cheese” by Dr Spencer Johnson.  It is a book about a quite (pardon the pun) cheesy story about two little men and two mice. I read this book and decided that ‘they’ (I love the spooky, scary, responsible and nameless group who fuck up our lives called – ‘They’) were no longer responsible for how I feel – bearing in mind that at the exact time that I realise this I realised that ‘they’ didn’t think that they ever were.  This had been a long term thing, 11 years and it had taken me about 11 minutes to read the book and I was completely gone and never looked back 11 days later.  As a matter of fact, in the above situation the last time I walked away after not packing my baggage but throwing it away I actually (really and literally) cheered and laughed!

As you may have read on my quotes page one of my favourite quotes is the definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  I think it is also insane to be doing the same thing over and over again and not noticing.

I have mostly written about going, but I am sure, in the future I will write about staying – it’s just today I realised that leaving things behind often needs that bridge burnt not only to stop you going back but also to stop them following you – in some cases figuratively and others literally!

I know sometimes we have to live with things (like kids!) and sometimes it is hard to walk away.  But, if you decide to walk, and you have decided for all the right reasons, never look back ever – NEVER take one more puff from that cigarette.

Also when you walk away often you walk towards what you have always been looking for.  For me part of being a better man is knowing that where I am now, being with the people that add to my life is because sometimes in the past I had to leave things behind.  Sometimes that leaving was walking away, sometimes running and for the most part it was about getting them out of my head.

I have not doubt if I had not, today I would not be sitting here in our home looking forward to where we are going next, as opposed to lamenting where I have been.