Thought Picnic: Homing in on relocation turmoil

An apparent suddenness of circumstances

As the day nears the seriousness of the situation gets even more acute, not even two weeks ago would I have considered I would be making this momentous and life-changing decision.

In some cases, I doubt I am ready for it at all, it is looking like a classic case of being guided or even forced by circumstances rather than creating the circumstances in which you want to control all the events and issues around you – it is a very unfamiliar place.

However, in the last two years I have been in the most unfamiliar places of vulnerability, disease, lack and apparent lack of direction. It would appear there is an agenda only that it is scheduling the chaos that swirls around me without my having the control of the matters it presents.

Questions to ask

The countdown now is 11 days to my new job in England and I have to ask myself if I am asking the right questions and thereby getting answers to the things that should be managed, under control and sorted out.

There is no doubt that any move is stressful and disrupting, some friends have seen it as a new beginning too; I seem to have the 180 degree gaze of the extremes of the best and worst of the situation because I am in the centre of it all.

That question is how do you package a 20 year existence into a kind of storage whilst you find your feet, find your level and find your grounding in a new environment?

As I attempt to distance myself from the rut of it all to hopefully have an unbiased view of the matter, I recognise that the job opportunities seemed to be showing up more in the UK that in the Netherlands and I was pitching for those offers as they came.

A foreigner of sorts

The fact is, though I am a UK citizen with all the eligibility of working back at “home”, my home for the last 11 and more years has been in the Netherlands and essentially I am being employed by a global company to take up a permanent role away from my current domicile.

I suppose, the question I have not asked is, do they have a relocation package that includes, advice, help, assistance and reintegration programmes for returnees because if I am to be the most productive in my new role the last thing I want and they will want on my mind is the turmoil of settling down enough to settle properly in the job and make a good fist at it.

Somehow, I feel a bit relieved about having thought it through to this and it will be my first email out on Monday, the situation with them will now be if it matters that much to them to help – I should spend the weekend reading the contracts and terms as I hope to find some resolution to this interesting dilemma.

The fact is sometimes; your answers are framed by the questions you ask. As a friend shared, these trials are not beyond the realm of resolution.