I got my hair cut last week and have rediscovered part of my brain
And I bused back into Toronto Monday afternoon, dressed business casual, with a newly issued company laptop-plus-tote in hand, and it felt good. 2008 has been about an aging boy playing at student, fighting every week against the memory of how good it felt to make money, to spend it, to make it again, to spend it again.
Scaling back, then steering away from a career path I’d planned to walk for the rest of my life was frustrating, and I went kicking and screaming into the new year, galvanized by equal doses of righteous self-pity and time-is-now desperation.
Neither of these are pretty hearts to wear on sleeves, and since the back story was hardly unique the message got massaged into digestible sound bites for polite company.
Like practically everybody reading this blog in its nascent stages, my life revolves around Centennial College. Most of this audience is fine-tuning or perhaps even re-inventing itself. It tumbled out the starting gate five months ago like marathoners do: experienced entrants minding a measured pace, keeping quiet and revealing little, while younger legs charged ahead with giddy enthusiasm.
I wasn’t sure which approach best suited me. I’ve always throught of myself as a middle-distance runner, possessed of both speed and smarts, though perhaps not having quite enough of either to win without some luck. I’ve sprinted from wire-to-wire before, burning the bloody candle at both ends until the wax and wick singed my fingertips. I’ve also started out at such a languid gait that I’ve been lapped by the field before I even realized we were keeping score.
We’re keeping score now.
It’s funny how muscle memory works. Leaving the confines of school behind for a day with a client should have been jarring, but instead it felt like old times. Workplace culture isn’t imposing if you’ve lived in it before. There’s more conformity. There’s an assumption of competency. You hope for a fair shake. You hope for challenges. You hope you brought a decent lunch.
For my part, I’m thankful that the race is on. It’s been lonely, churning in neutral.
Filed under: Deep Thoughts
“experienced entrants minding a measured pace, keeping quiet and revealing little.”
As a runner, I couldn’t help but reply to this post. I love the title and get the reference to the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (I only just saw the film version last year).
Ironically, I just finished writing an email to my coach about her co-coach who is pushing everybody way too fast. Speed is one thing, smarts is another. Every experienced distance runner knows that you never go all out at the start. Instead, you start with caution – conserving energy – and then save “all out” for the final half and sprint to the finish.
Here’s another running metaphor for you to apply to all of this – to apply to your career and transitions: sometimes people NEED to get injured before they learn. I always say a runner’s worst enemy is their ego. This goes for all of us. When hubris consumes you to the point of obscuring humility you simply cannot learn. I think any real learning – and progress in our lives – involves a great degree of humility. Running, like teaching, humbles me continually.
Great blog post. Thoughtful, intelligent and inspired.
Melanie,
Thanks so much for YOUR insight. My re-careering only began after much soul searching. We exit school with a great deal of hope for the future – a brand, if you will – and it is a significant moment in one’s life when they realize there’s more rebranding to come.
The film and book title which begat my post title is marvellously poignant. I WISH it was an original! We are often very much alone in enacting our long- and mid-range plans: far from home, from comfort, from friends and peers who simply cannot walk that mile in our shoes.
And a hair-trigger temper can really hurt us at such a time. Humility before hubris indeed!