22nd of Feb, a day on
which I had two back-to-back meetings, an offer was extended to me which changed
my idea of what 2017 was going to be like for me. You know how it is when you feel ready for
some kind of freshness, a change from your everyday routine (or lack thereof!),
and something new finds you? That.
That day, I rushed from one meeting with two interesting and empowered women, to another meeting, also with two interesting and empowered women. This one involved a project I had recently become part of - the World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child.
I arrived late (always rushin') and envisaged myself creeping into the room, apologising for my lateness, and
quietly getting a sense of what had been discussed so far. Instead, before I
could even settle down, I was asked, “Would you like to go to Sweden?” I felt
like I do when I walk past those people in the supermarkets with trays of my
favourite Lindt chocolate, the ones wrapped in red paper, and they ask me,
“Would you like a chocolate?” I basically want to relieve them of the tray, but
politely take one, smile, and say, “Thank you.”
Well, that was seven weeks ago. Today
is exactly one week till I board a plane and fly to Sweden, via Dubai. Reading
that sentence, I feel like it couldn’t possibly be about me, and yet it is.
If I told you I’ve been too busy to feel excited, you’d think I was being
fake-cool, but that’s actually the truth. How I squeezed all the arrangements
for going abroad into my crazily busy schedule, I can’t tell you. Thanks to the
cool people involved, and others in the company who regularly process paperwork
for staff travelling abroad, I managed to do what needed to be done.
But there’s another side to this,
and it’s about my personality – I tend to worry a lot. (That is such an
understatement, that my family and friends reading this are probably laughing.)
So, instead of easing my way through the next couple of days, I'm feeling the pressure of all the things I haven’t done yet and how few days I have in which to
achieve everything. Going to a country
that far north, with a climate so different to ours, has all kinds of implications
for what to pack. The truth is, I have to buy some important items, to cope
with the temperatures there. I will be in a town called Mariefred (close to Stockholm), from the 22nd
to the 29th of April, so I basically need appropriate clothing for a
week. Okay, I already feel better. It’s only one week, Trudy!
Two other areas have been causing
me to worry, and they are my children/young adults (we’ve sorted that out now)
and the technology side of things. Part of my role in Sweden entails taking
pictures and videos, and writing reports of the proceedings. I wasn’t worried
about the writing part, but I needed to upgrade my phone, which I finally
achieved yesterday.
Ok, so what’s left to worry
about?
I suppose I’ve sort of put my
anxiety into perspective while writing this blog post. And you know what? I
should know by now how the story goes: I worry, worry, worry, I write list
after list, I tick off the items on the lists, I try to think of every little
detail I may have overlooked, and I obsess like a person who’s never done
anything requiring attention to detail before, and, in the end, it all works
out just fine! In fact, it usually works out more than just fine!
So, having said all of that, I
now need to tell you about the project that is the reason for my going to
Sweden: the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child. Because this
post has been so personal, I’ll talk exclusively about the WCP in a separate
post, later today.
Watch this space!