When the expiration of your job contract approaches, the more insistent thought that begins is: “What will I do next?”. In my case, this thought usually appears six to seven months before the end of the contract, because, let’s be clear, it is not that the contracts have been here for more than a year. Of course, the doctorate turned out to be a good three-year contract but it has always represented a sort of intermediate step compared to the beginning of the true working life.
In my experience as a student-worker I have had several periods of “forced unemployment” and although they have always been extremely short, they have always left me a beautiful memory.
Now, that I have been for a few weeks nowin the first real period of unemployment in my life (and by unemployment I mean that period of time in which the State recognizes you a subsidy for the work done in the previous years), I am trying to skim my thoughts and leave me a bit of space and time not occupied by the search for the next job.
The doctorate left me a bit with a bitter taste in the mouth, a feeling known to many former Italian colleagues and not that found themselves with nothing in their hand at the end of the doctoral path but a burden of anxiety. So, after having abundantly complained, I began to think about what I would have liked to do, clearly in the “free” hours from the job search.
I state that with a child at home is not easy, but it is true that … the nursery helps even only 3 days a week.
So I began to think again beyond what for years has distinguished me: my research.
And I discovered a universe!
It does not take much time, just few moments to think or to rethink those things we left on the street, which we have forgotten or just put aside. Of course, the biggest discovery of this period was that I’m not my job.
So many things have changed in my life, we have become Vattelapesca family , and this has helped me discover new dimensions of life and above all that happiness does not depend on the work you have, the role you cover but on how you take care of the time you have.
It’s a simply truth we keep forgetting.
Think about that!
Vattelapesca 