It's all a matter of perspective

Today as I was microwaving my lunch, a colleague - the executive director of another organization in our office suite - started asking me about the life of an interim. I've become a bit of an evangelist on this score, encouraging every exhausted CEO I meet to consider the temp life. "I'm kind of in awe of you," she said. "It's like being the substitute teacher. You have to just walk into chaos and deal with whatever you find. It sounds terrifying to me."

"Oh," I said with surprise, never having thought about it that way. "Actually, I'd say just the opposite. I'm in awe of you. You do your job every day while also having to think about how you're going to pay the bills and keep people employed in, like, 2009. Now that's terrifying."

I told her that I'd finally accepted my true nature, as someone who needs to move on to something new pretty regularly. It's just how I am. I spent most of my high school years studying to become a professional musician - only to change my mind (somewhat traumatically, actually) in my senior year. For a while I was into reading poetry at bedtime every night, a tradition that Enrico rather liked, and he seemed puzzled and a little sad when I just stopped one day. No more poetry, done. Same with the vegetable garden - one year I'm building cold frames and researching heirloom seed varities, the next year the whole place can go to wildflower for all I care. Writing murder mysteries? Did that. On to sweeping historical sagas based on my eccentric family history. My fluent French? Fading fast, but maybe I should learn Arabic!

Sometimes I fear that I'm going to tire of things that are really good for me. Like exercise - I do fall off that wagon regularly - or yoga. Having finally found a church I can groove on, I hope it doesn't prove a fair-weather commitment. I'd better not wake up tomorrow and decide I'm no longer a dog person.

Supposedly, my Myers-Briggs personality type is like this. Hard to be in a relationship with, according to one book on the subject! Independent, inscrutable, slightly eccentric, and prone to obsessiveness about one's interests. I don't see myself that way, but shockingly, when I asked my beloved hubby about it - hey hon, am I stubbornly independent and slightly inscrutable? - he remembered a sudden urgent need to inspect the compost pile, or something.