I want to stop

I want to stop.

I want to stop repeating the same thing every day no longer knowing why and barely caring; I want to stop having to concentrate so hard on not falling off that I don’t know where I am, where I’m heading or how fast I am going.  I want to stop being jammed in the centre of a pack, a flock, all headed somewhere, all headed to the same place, but where that is I don’t know and neither does anyone else.  I want to stop.

If only I could stop.

If only I could stop, I could take a look around at where I am and where I am heading, but I can’t.  If only I could stop I could look back at where I have come from, and I would see the turnings I might have taken.  They’re all grown over now, impenetrable and clogged with weeds, and I can’t take those turnings any more but there might be some more up ahead.  If only I could stop, I could find those turnings and make sure I don’t miss them like the last ones.

I can’t stop.

I can’t stop though, so I’ll probably miss those turnings, because I am too busy pedalling and concentrating on the ground immediately in front of me, trying to avoid the mundane pits and rocks that can knock you off, but not having time to check my course.  I can’t stop, and I never will, until I run out of road which has followed a route that I didn’t choose.

Then I’ll stop, and look at all the turnings I missed.

What have I learnt?

Now that I have reached a certain age milestone about which I am none too happy, I thought I would write down some conclusions I have reached about life.

• Other people don’t matter.  Unless your decisions affect them, or their decisions affect you, the views of other people don’t matter.  you can’t persuade the world you are right, even if you are.  I act on this.
• Other people matter.  Stay in touch with old friends, try and make new ones.  I need to do this more.
• Every time you spend money, you are voting for the kind of world you want.  Someone else said that, or thereabouts, but I can’t find who.  I don’t act on this as much as I should.
• Some decisions matter and some don’t.  Work out which are which.  I am generally OK at this.
• Nearly every tomorrow will be more or less the same as every yesterday.  That is, when the news is predicting catastrophe and doom, it nearly always won’t happen.  BSE, SARS, bird flu, swine flu – yes, people died, but there weren’t mass epidemics and bodies piling up on the streets like it sounded there would be.  I act on this.
• There has never, ever, in the history of humanity, been more opportunity than there is now.  Tomorrow there will be even more.  If you are invested in some kind of (probably affected) generational ennui; thinking that we have nothing to achieve, nothing to fight for; then I call bullshit.  The problem is you, not the world.
• Press Publish.  Ask her out.  Sign up for the course.  Make the call.  Whatever it is, do it.

Getting rid of Stuff

I and ‘Er Indoors are making an inventory of All Our Stuff.  Everything.  We rent a furnished flat but even so you can still accumulate a lot of detritus that you really don’t need and frankly don’t even want.

When you look at your possessions in isolation it can be easy to justify owning each one, so we are making a list so that we can see the extent of the accumulation.  We are also ranking how much we want to keep each item on a 1-5 scale.  I still haven’t quite got the hang of this because so far I have been ranking my CDs by how much I like them, which is different to whether or not I should keep them.  An album of a band I loved 15 years ago may get a high “liking” score compared to a recent purchase that I am only just getting in to, but it is the latter I should be keeping.  I think I will be pretty ruthless with the CDs when the time comes, as you don’t NEED them, and most stuff you can get on Spotify.

For clothes, apart from boring stuff like socks (of which you only need so many) everything has to pass one of two criteria: either it makes you feel shit-hot, or it is enabling.  My suits stay because they make me feel shit-hot, my climbing shoes stay because they enable me to pursue a really fun activity (climbing, obviously).  As much of everything else as possible gets ditched.

A brother of a friend of my partner spends most of his time house-sitting, so avoids paying rent but has to move around fairly often.  I think that would be a bit of a leap for me, but a nice situation to be in vis a vis Stuff would be for all our possessions to fit comfortably in a car, just in case we want to become professional house-sitters.

If you turn it this way everything becomes clear

Often, you can’t see the wood for the trees.  But sometimes if you keep searching, and look from different points of view, and turn the idea this way and that, the way forward suddenly becomes clear.

You don’t have the right to not be offended

That doesn’t mean that it is OK for people to be rude, hectoring, obnoxious.  It’s not OK, but you don’t have a “right” to be free from it unless it constitutes sustained abuse and harassment, which it usually doesn’t.  Instead of protecting your rights, exercise your freedoms instead and ignore your combatant or put them back in their box with a withering retort.  The flip side is that just because you have the freedom to be rude, hectoring, obnoxious, you have no “right” to be so, and anyway it still makes you a ******.

You don’t see with just your eyes

My undergraduate degree is in ecology, but I am a terrible field ecologist.  To me birds comprise robins, crows, pigeons, and all the other ones; and trees are all oaks or not-oaks.

In the summer between our first and second year we had to make a taxonomic collection – collect, preserve and identify examples of 15-20 species from a taxonomic group or closely related groups.  At my mum’s suggestion I chose grasses, and quickly expanded this to include sedges.  Prior to this I had always strolled along country paths and through woods and, whilst I always liked the setting, I only ever saw an indistinct green background.  But once I had to look and understand, that is when I really began to see what that green background was – and it was intricate and beautiful.  By the end of the summer I could spot a species of grass I hadn’t yet collected from several metres away amongst a riot of green, when all I used to see was a green background.  You see more when you know what you are looking at.

If you want to pick up field identification skills, it can be a bit daunting when you speak to someone who knows what every bird call and flash of feather belongs to, or what kind of geologic material that stone and those cliffs are.  But the best way to start is from the beginning.  First, learn to identify the really obvious stuff, the ones you see all the time.  Want to know about birds but don’t know the difference between a coot and a moorhen?  Go to the pond with a bird handbook, wait till you see one or the other, and look it up.  Don’t go out straight out looking for kingfishers, start with the ones you will see most often.  Quickly, you will be confident in identifying 75% of what you see if you know the most common ones.  Your eye is then attuned to looking for one you haven’t yet seen.  See with your mind, not just your eyes.

You don’t need to take a gap year…

…but you don’t need to go straight to university either.  What you need to do is get on with the next year of your life.

An article in the Daily Telegraph today entitled “Bridging the work experience gap” got me thinking about my attitude to gap years.  After college (study at 16-18, for my international readers) I intended to take a gap year, which soon turned into two.  By “take a gap year”, what I mean is I went to Vietnam for three months as a volunteer with the environmental NGO Frontier, doing environmental work.  My plan for the remaining nine months was to stay at home with my parents and have semi-regular work that would keep me in cider until I went to university, after which my student loan would be keeping me in cider (I was a late convert to beer).

However, I ended up getting a year-long contract as a chemistry analyst in a water company laboratory.  I only applied on the off-chance, it being the only job in the New Scientist that didn’t require a degree.  Somehow I got it, so I moved away from home and UEA kindly allowed me to defer taking up my place for another year.  It was awesome, and actually far more formative than my time abroad.  I moved in to a shared house in a new town, and started earning money and paying rent for the first time.

Was this a gap (two-)year?  It started out like that, with the standard extended overseas trip and an assured place at university.  Or was it just the next two years of my life, which happened not to be in formal education?  The idea of a gap-year implies that spending your entire time in formal education is the natural order of things and that doing something else, however positive, is a “gap” in the fabric of what you should be doing.  I don’t agree with this.  University isn’t for everybody, and university straight after college certainly isn’t.  I am a university person so I went to university.  But I am also someone who needs variety, so a two-year breather from formal education was just what I needed.  Some people should go straight to university, some never.  There are plenty of options, like delaying university, or studying part-time (the Open University is the biggest university in the UK!), or getting a job, or whatever.

So, don’t take a gap year, but do get on with the next year of your life.  Make it a good one.

Take a deep breath…

I have taken a plunge, which in reality is barely a plunge at all.  Until last week I worked full-time, Monday-Friday.  For a year or so I felt that this was preventing me from going out and exploring other opportunities, money-making or not.  Finally, I decided to take decisive action!  Did I go freelance?  Did I set up my own company?  No and twice no.  Instead, I cut my hours to a four-day week!

In the big scheme of things, this is nothing.  A friend of mine runs a venture capital-funded internet start-up business; another just seems to manage to float from job to job, always landing on her feet.  Me, I’m generally quite risk averse, and appreciate the comfort of a regular salary.  So to give up about a fifth of my earnings feels like a much bigger wrench than it actually is.  All I will have to do is keep more track of my beer and discretionary spending money.

Last week was actually my first four-day week, although I didn’t find that out until Tuesday, having already taken the Monday off to attend a day of mentor training (more of which in a later post).  However, from this week my default working week will be Mon-Tue and Thur-Fri at the salaried coalface, with Wednesdays free for whatever current scheme I have going.  I made a conscious decision to make my non-salary day (not my day-off!!) a mid-week day – if it had been Monday or Friday the would be too much temptation to make it an extension of my weekend.

What will I be doing with my non-salary day?  I will be pursuing some freelance work, although I don’t expect this to make up much of the salary I am foregoing.  The point is more for it to be an exercise in developing and selling my skills.  I will also be spending some time researching some stuff that I have been interested in for a while, but haven’t had the time to do anything about.  A long way down the line this may or may not lead to gainful employment.  This week, I shall be attending Birmingham C21st Innovation Showcase, about local tech start-ups.  I don’t have an invention up my sleeve, but hopefully it will be food for thought.