I love my job.
Really, I do.
Naturally, there are frustrations and elements of my work I’m not so keen on.
But that doesn’t detract from the fact that I’m privately proud of how I spend the majority of the hours in my week.
Knowing that I’m lucky to be able to say that saddens me sometimes.
I truly wish that everyone was as quietly content as I am.
Then again, perhaps there are plenty of people like me.
From countless conversations across the course of my relatively short lifetime, I’ve discovered I’m in good company when it comes to being unable to ‘blow my own trumpet’.
Those who shout the loudest have that curious ability to make themselves seem numerous, but I have the feeling we humble beings are the multitudinous majority.
The funny thing is, there’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling pride. It’s the quality of its expression that matters.
You can sense when someone is genuinely fulfilled. It possesses a potency far greater in power than that of a plethora of empty proclamations.
For me, it’s the privilege of reading, hearing and sharing people’s stories that consumes me with comfort. That and the fortune of being involved with something that’s a source of positivity and change.
Job descriptions and quotidian tasks don’t always attest to the appreciation we personally associate with our whiled away working days.
Indeed, I can’t be alone in occasionally having to remind myself of my motivations.
Nevertheless, they’re always whirring away at my core. Just as they do in so many others.
It’s this that leads me to interrogate ‘success’ as something prescriptive. As though there’s a paved path to follow that will inevitably lead you to the ‘top’ (wherever that is) and thus to satisfaction.
Of course, depending on who you are, this could well happen.
However, given that our relationship with ‘success’ is entirely relative, why ascribe to the pressure of ‘the process’.
It took me a while to realise that ‘education’ is not synonymous with ‘school’.
Education eases its way into our lives in myriad forms and much more can be learned through listening to people than by competing with them.
Gloria Steinem emphatically echoes this far more eloquently than I in My Life on the Road.
As the title implies, it turns out that Steinem too took some time to discover that whilst there may be a greater gulf between ‘the path’ and ‘the road’ than semantics suggests, taking the seldom trodden track often lends itself to learning worthwhile lessons.
Gracious gratitude grips her every word; warm whispers of pride caress her every paragraph.
Ironic as it may be, sincerity seems to thrive in modest pride.
Some might say this rather contradicts my point.
Most would silently smile.
We’ve always known there’s no finer place for pride than in this peculiar paradox.
We’ve just rarely felt the need to tell you.
Modernish 