A rewarding leap of faith

(News Terupdate) - You come home from work at night, tired and drained. You silently weep into your pillow, wondering where things went wrong. You blink and morning comes. You have mortgages to pay. You hate your job.

Sounds familiar?

We spend much of our lives at work. But often, the time spent at work can be the most painful and numbing activity in one’s life.

Yet it can also be the most fulfilling of activities which, in times of financial uncertainty, can be robbed from people by company layoffs.

Recently, local newspaper Berita Kota carried out a mass layoff of 144 workers. Several Jakarta-based newspapers were also downsizing their staff numbers. In the aftermath of the 1998 Asian financial crisis, around 3 million people lost their jobs.

In the rat race to financial success and finding contentment in life, some people chose different routes, while others get knocked out from the race just to find themselves catching up through alternative ways.

Both those who love and loathe their job can get fired. And there are those who consciously quit their job to pursue another career. Either way, having no security from a full-time job is daunting and challenging.

Despite the challenges of letting go of a secure full-time job, Bali-based yoga instructor Pratisia Prakarsa, 34, said she quit her job as a journalist because she became “news-sick”.

More than three years after she quit her post at a news agency, she lives in one of the most beautiful islands in Indonesia, with a studio that faces the ocean as her workplace.

“And I work without my shoes on,” she chuckled over the phone.

She entered the press corps exactly one day before then president Soeharto stepped down from office in May 1998. “It was the most exciting time,” she said.

Her excitement waned over the years, saying that she felt it was the same thing all over again. “I became tired of it. I became news-sick,” she said. She could not stand watching or reading the news.

“Now, I follow the news in a relaxed way through the Internet. I don’t get angry anymore when I read the newspaper and watch news programs,” she said with a laugh.

Patrisia started doing yoga in 2003. She quit her job as a journalist in December 2006 and traveled to India for yoga teacher training.

She returned to Indonesia and became a part-time yoga teacher while working at the UNDP and then Greenpeace.

“I realized that I liked teaching yoga more than my full-time work when I couldn’t wait to go to my class after work,” she said. She became irritated with late-night work because she had to cancel her classes.

She said that for her career jump, she had to dig into her savings to fund her teacher training. She sold her apartment in Jakarta and moved to Bali in 2007. “Personally, I’ve had it with Jakarta,” she said.

Patrisia said that she feels happier now. In her work as a journalist, she said she felt good when her videos were used by international news channels such as CNN. But as a yoga teacher, she felt more direct feedback on her work. “People come up to me and say their bodies feel better. I see my students’ progress from not being able [to do the poses] to mastering them,” she said.

Irma Rachmi chose yoga as her line of work after quitting her job as a manager in a service office.

She only started teaching yoga full-time this year. After learning yoga and the art of meditation, she finally realized that she did not like her job.

“I felt apprehensive, knowing that I wouldn’t work in an office anymore. I wouldn’t have a fix income and I wondered whether I would get students or not,” she said.

Even though her income as an employee was more than being a new yoga teacher, she said that she knew this was what she wanted.

Contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton in his most recent book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, wrote that people in the modern working world have a wide-held belief that work should make them happy.

“However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world is in the end internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely-held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their center; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative,” he wrote in his book.

For Selina Sumbung, 36, who is now in her third career move, changes in priorities were the reasons to switch professions. A partner in a private equity fund company, she once worked in finance and publishing.

Working in finance in big multinational companies, she moved to publishing because she wanted to establish some roots after so much traveling in her eight years in finance.

Now, in the private equity fund company, she works on small projects such as in Vietnam to microfinance in Indonesia.

“This builds new businesses and open up jobs. It’s giving to the community,” she said.

In her blog geminiislikemonkey.blogspot.com, 34-year-old craftswoman Ika Vantiani quoted a printing press artist and activist Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.: “Don’t be an artist. Artists are full of themselves. Just make stuff. Just quit your job or whatever you hate doing, and make stuff, damn it.”

Two years ago, Ika did just that.

After working in the advertising industry for more than 12 years, she jumped the fence, and decided to work on her craft.

Ika is an up-and-coming collage artist who makes a variety of items, such as bags and T-shirts, from recycled materials. Having always been active in Jakarta’s do-it-yourself scene, publishing the Peniti Pink magazine, she finally made the leap of faith to do her art full-time.

With two friends, she opened the Bikin Barang store in Kemang that sells a variety of unique things made from recycled materials.

Ika said she was more into her craft than her day job, when she was still working nine to five. When
she quit her job, Ika did freelance copywriting.

“But I still have the urge to just make a living from my craft,” she said.

While collage art is a rare thing in Indonesia, there is a huge international community of collage artists, Ika said. She has been thinking about devoting her time to her art for four years.

“I felt that I had had enough of work. And my mom was about to go on the haj and I was to go with her. So the timing was just right,” she said.

She now sells her collage art at vantiani.etsy.com.

After leaving her full-time job, her life has changed from night to day. She now travels around to shop for supplies and spends her time thinking of new ideas of things to make. She said that she can spend up to 10 hours working on her craft. Her work now, she said, was to invest more time in marketing her craft and building a community by sharing what she does with other people.

“For me personally, it’s very empowering to be able to see stuff that I made with my own hands,” she said. “Every time I finish a collage piece, I’m still so impressed. It feels really good. I really love it and I’m really happy.”

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