Juggling

Time is passing here in Munich.

Within the last week there has been a drastic drop in the temperature, something that caught me out one morning when beguiled by bright sunshine, I went out wearing summer flats and almost lost a toe to the cold. The counterpoint to this is a final flare of autumn colours with Munich’s many green spaces now glowing in ochre, umber and scarlet instead. It is a heady experience going for a walk through the Maximiliansanlage as the leaves almost fluoresce at sunset. Of course, such walks are strictly a weekend feature seeing as another offshoot of the descent into winter is that the sun now sets during working hours.

Similar seasonal cycling is happening in the UK too, judging from the stunning shots my father sends me of the garden back home. Seeing the familiar photos provokes a pang of longing for the niceties of home, which is then sobered by follow-up pictures of bills and scary “PLEASE RESPOND URGENTLY” letters, which have been redirected to my parents’ address now that I am living abroad.

That is a key issue I have been contending with during my time here in Germany. Despite emigrating a few months ago, of course I did not wholly quit my life back in the UK. England is where my family and friends still live and where I fledged my medical career. There is no question of me completely abandoning that. This makes for a rather tricky situation, whereby I am trying to maintain two lives in two different countries separated by the English Channel.

And this is where the superheroes come in.

I am incredibly lucky to have a number of extraordinary friends and mentors in the UK, who have the grace and generosity to help me even though I am 740 miles away. On many an occasion I have roped them into the fiendish process of handling some sort of bureaucratic process on my behalf with nothing but the promise of good karma. Administrative chains can be cumbersome enough to deal with when it is your own albatross but to try and solve them for someone else, who is living abroad and whose mother’s maiden name isn’t to hand, takes a great deal of time, energy and good will.

Similarly friends and family are there for pep talks, career counselling and general catch-ups via all the digital mediums available these days. As such, although I am living in Munich, I could quite easily plot a firework-like network map of all the personal connections that keep my mood, my career and my life afloat in both the UK and Germany.

At the same time, however, I am aware that I must also do my part in propping up a full time job in Germany, my responsibilities back in the UK and importantly, maintaining those relationships spanning the two countries. Needless to say, striking the balance is hard. It was only after waiting three months to buy stamps to send a stack of postcards written in August, that I realised I was going to have to up my time management skills. I have now advanced to full control freak levels by making a weekly planner of all my free time, scheduling everything from dinners with friends to calling my mother. I think I am going to go the whole hog and ask for a Filofax for Christmas.

Despite all my attempts to juggle the many parts of my life, I often find myself caught out and calling on a much forsaken friend or colleague to help me out in time of need. It may have been months or even years since I last talked to them but they invariably come through. It makes it so much easier knowing that there are many pairs of kind hands all over the globe to catch my spinning plates as they fall.

As I said, I am incredibly lucky.

Dedicated to Dr Acevedo, Dr de Belder and Dr Thillainathan