Six more sleeps

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 22^nd to the 29^th 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!