When I grow up I want to be…

Realising that I’m into a time of quite a bit of musing about work, and what I could be doing in the future.

Perhaps it’s taking me a long time to find the courage to make a change…while all around me colleagues have been doing so quite happily. This last week has shown me two more people who are leaving, and have been chatting to another who’s about to take up a secondment to work in Germany for several months.

One reminder came from Robert Crampton in yesterday’s column in the Saturday Times. Commenting on kids writing to him, asking him how and where to start writing, his advice is: just start.

Paul Simon steps in straight after:

“Want to be a writer?

Don’t know how or when?

Find a quiet place

Use a humble pen.”

Today, we had a speaker at church who had climbed major mountains with her husband, trecked to both Poles, that kind of thing. Among her tips: preparation and perseverance are in there, but the first on the list is passion.

There are a few other things that get in the way of having a complete break, like mortgages, standing orders and the like. I suspect it is not necessarily a clean sweep that I am after, but a change of stroke. 100 lengths of breaststroke done – time to master the butterfly. Still swimming. Still keeping going. Just not doing it in quite the same way.

I am forced to remind myself that my job entails encouraging people to have a gap year, to try something new, to gain a fresh perspective. I’ve been lucky – I had two gap years, and a return to university for a year, before trying to earn a crust in a serious way.

Perhaps it’s the seven year itch, transposed to a work context.

Some kids had a clear idea of what they wanted to be, early on. I remember a school essay when I was around the age of six or seven, ‘My ambition’. I didn’t really have one – I made one up, although I got quite into it once I started writing it. I was going to be a physiotherapist, according to the essay. You can probably tell that one didn’t work out.

I’ve remembered the other prompter – watching Dr Who Confidential last night, where David Tennant, the current Doctor, interviewed various people working on the series to see how it might have inspired them to do their current jobs.

All of a sudden, it was back to thinking about passions, excitements, views into an adult world that might even be OK to grow up in.

What did I love doing? Listening to and playing music. Reading and writing my own stuff. Escaping to other worlds, or being transported inside someone else’s world. Finding that someone else thought as I did.

Perhaps the hope is that I can get involved in writing the next chapter of my story. Relearning the art of the possible.

What does it look like? Still no idea. But ‘story’ seems to be coming up a lot.

If art is taking a line for a walk, perhaps it’s time to take some more words for a walk…and see where we find ourselves in the process.