What time does your alarm clock go off each morning? Five-thirty, six o'clock? Chances are it's earlier than you care for. Then, after a hurried breakfast - if you have time for breakfast at all - you head for your car or the nearest train or bus and spend the next 40 minutes or more lost in an angry herd of fellow commuters.
When you finally arrive at your office you find it pretty much the same as when you left it yesterday. There's your small desk in a nondescript workstation; there's your computer bulging with unanswered emails that arrived overnight. A small pile of faxes also demanding your attention sits beside a phone that will start ringing even before the workday officially begins at 9 a.m.
After a cup of bad coffee, it's down to work. You probably have a meeting to attend, a project to wrap up or a deadline to meet. You're always busy, always feeling the pressure to perform, to hit the mark, to compete with all those others beavering away behind the office partitions. For the next eight hours you work, pausing only for the occasional coffee refill or to chat briefly with another employee. Lunch is a cling-wrapped sandwich eaten at your desk, on quieter days a hot takeaway from the shopping centre across the road. At six you turn off the computer and head for home. It's usually dark by the time you arrive. Between dinner and sleep you try to make time for the important people in your life - your kids, your partner, your friends. There's rarely any time left to spend on you.
As you head off to bed you realise two things. The first is that another day has passed you by in a blur of paperwork and telephone calls, traffic queues and office politics. The second is that tomorrow that alarm will ring out in the early morning gloom and you will get up and do it all over again.
Not a holiday with long airport check-in queues, jetting from place to place, but a quiet, peaceful, refreshing country holiday with long, sunfilled days full of idleness and starry nights when you can almost hear the silence, if you know what I mean. You may even find the time to read Cindy Dowling's wonderful book "Sea Change - Australians in pursuit of the good life" ☺
At "Riverbend" you don't get woken up; instead, you wake up when you're good and ready because the only noise you hear is the one you make. At "Riverbend" idle time is not wasted time but the time you need to get back in touch with yourself and your partner.
Shrug off your big-city hang-ups and embrace a simpler life at "Riverbend" - for a week, for a month, or perhaps forever because "Riverbend" is also for sale - click here - as we're heading for an even simpler life in the wilds of Borneo.
