How do you know when its time to go?

I’m not a quitter.

Early in life my parents taught me not to quit. I wasn’t allowed to quit the softball team when I got bored. I wasn’t allowed to quit organ (yes, organ, not piano) lessons just because I hated them. I wasn’t allowed to quit anything. Once I signed up for something the activity had to come to a natural end before I could stop doing it.

As a kid I hated being forced to finish things but it taught me the value of finishing things for when life got harder as an adult.

However as an adult who had the ‘you aren’t a quitter’ mantra drilled into her head, it can be difficult sometimes to know when to finish something.

How long do you stay friends with an emotional vampire, who sucks all the life out of a friendship?

How long do you stay in a job that doesn’t fulfil your heart but does put money in your pocket?

How long do you stay in a marriage where the two of you haven’t grown together, you’ve just grown apart? And what happens when there are kids to consider?

Ending anything for me is difficult. Ending things where other people’s feelings are involved is doubly difficult but sometimes, it has to be done.

I’ve come to realise that life is nothing but a series of beginnings and endings. Look around. Everything is in a state of flux and change: birth, life, death…the cycle appears all around us, all of the time. And the state of our relationships with other people is no exception.

Many times you have to have an ending for something new and beautiful to be created. Think of a Phoenix – it has to die and burn to ash in order to rise again, stronger than before.

Change is scary for most people. It still is for me, but changing some things in my life over the past 18 months has helped make further changes easier.

On Friday I had my farewell lunch for a job that I’ve held for eight years. The team gave me some lovely gifts and said some really lovely things about me. But as I looked around the table, I knew it was the right decision to leave the security of this job and open my own business. I’m ready. And I don’t look at it as quitting one thing. I look at it more as changing, adapting and building on what I’ve already done to create something new and exciting.

And if this doesn’t work out, I’ll continue to adapt and change to meet the flow of life at that point in time. If I trust my intuition, I think I’ll always know the right time to move on.