Here Comes The Sun

There is something rather telling about the British relationship with the sun. It only has to appear, not blaze, not commit, just suggest itself, and suddenly everything feels possible again. Plans are made. Coats are removed with a kind of reckless optimism. People sit outside cafés as though they have been personally invited by the Mediterranean. And yet, of course, the clouds have not gone anywhere. They have just stepped aside for a moment. Which makes you wonder whether it is not the sun that changes things, but our sudden awareness of what has been sitting over us all along. This morning, by the marina, coffee in hand, cake doing its quiet but important work, I found myself sitting with a neighbour, putting the world to rights in that way one does when there is no particular urgency to anything. A small moment. An unplanned one. But one of those moments that gently resets the day. And it struck me that 2026 has had its fair share of cloud. Professional ones, certainly. The sort that arrive disguised as process, review, or that slightly ominous phrase, we are just rethinking things going forward. I have noticed a great many LinkedIn posts recently that begin, After X wonderful years, I have decided to move on, and end with, so I am now exploring exciting new opportunities. And you read them and think, have you? Or have you been gently encouraged toward the door with a firm handshake and a well worded paragraph? Because there is a particular tone to those posts. Brave. Polished. Forward looking. But just underneath it, if you have ever been there, there is something else. A wobble. A bruise. A quiet, unspoken, I did not see that coming. I have had moments of that this year. Moments where the ground shifts slightly and you realise that something you thought was solid was not quite as fixed as you had imagined. And in those moments, it is very easy to think the cloud is the story. That this is it. This is the weather now. But here is the thing I am slowly learning, and, if I am honest, occasionally having to relearn, sometimes the cloud is the thing that moves you. Not out. But on. Because just as often as something ends, something else, unexpected, unplanned, and rather better suited, begins. A new project. A new conversation. A new version of yourself that had not quite had the space to appear before. That is the strange, maddening, occasionally glorious reality of freelance life. You are never as secure as you would like and never as stuck as you fear. For those stepping away, or being stepped away, from ten, fifteen, twenty years in one place, I do not for a second underestimate how seismic that feels. When an organisation that prides itself on looking after its people suddenly does not, it lands. It really does. But, and this is the part that is harder to see when you are in it, that may not be the moment the light goes out. It may be the moment the sky changes. Because the sun does not disappear. It just waits. And when it does come through, even briefly, you remember something important, that possibility was there all along. You just could not quite see it through the cloud. So if this is one of those moments for you, if something has shifted, or ended, or quietly been taken out of your hands, do not assume the story is over. It may just be that your chair has been moved to a table in the sun.

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