This month, I published the final audio meditation track in a chapter of my life that has lasted more than ten and a half years. Appropriately, it is called When One Door Closes. You can listen to it, and watch the accompanying video, here.
Just before I received the notification that it had gone live, I was out walking the dogs and something had already shifted.
For the first time in many years, I felt light. I had decided to leave the past behind and to allow a different future to present itself. It is not my first intra-life reincarnation and possibly not my last.
It was as if a burden I had been carrying for far too long had suddenly fallen away. The strange sensation of trying to create while wearing chains around my neck and weights on my feet had lifted.
The final trigger came in the delivery of a long-delayed feature, one that many of us had been requesting for years, but nowhere near the priority requirement. On paper, it looked like progress. In practice, it exposed something far more troubling.
The constraints placed upon the content, and the way those constraints were communicated, proved to be the breaking point for me.
I had spent two full days uploading material according to one set of guidelines, only to discover that the rules had changed overnight without warning and with zero notification. The goalposts had quietly moved. Content was then rejected for reasons that were illogical, inconsistent, irrational and painfully mundane.
The video I created to accompany this final track would not have passed those aesthetic standards, so I chose not to submit it. And yet, to my mind, it complements the audio beautifully and adds something original and creative to the whole experience.
Having begun my professional life at the BBC in 1979, and spent more than three decades working in high-end broadcast and film, I have found myself awash with emotion. Amazed and shocked that blinkered inexperience was setting nonsensical rules. This was also not the first time.
But yet, as a mindfulness mentor, I can also recognise the sadness beneath it all.
Sadness at stepping away from something I have cared about deeply for so long. Sadness at leaving behind a body of work, and perhaps also some people, into which I have poured real love, energy, and intention over many years.
There is guilt in the mix too.
I may be moving forward with new plans, fresh possibilities, and exciting projects, but I know I am also leaving behind many people I encouraged to step through that particular doorway in the first place.
There are good people there. I do not doubt that for a moment. But good people are not always enough when there is a paucity of communication with content partners, and too little genuine innovation.
Still, there comes a moment when staying becomes heavier than leaving.
And perhaps that is how we know a door is no longer meant to remain open.
So yes, one door has closed.
But the fog has cleared.
The weight has lifted.
And I am already sensing the next one opening.
