Salute to Changes
August 29, 2017
Hey GOOD NEWS! I have just graduated from University of Southampton now! Not a to-be-civil engineer, I am a civil engineer now, with a proper degree. WEEHEE!
So after I will be going to Cardiff for my postgraduate degree, and without a doubt it would be a whole different world. My undergraduate degree is done, and what would be greeting me would be a postgraduate degree. And what does postgraduate mean? It means I would be hanging out with people a lot more mature than me, a lot more thoughtful than me. Long gone would be the days messing around, mixing vodka and beer and jumping over fences and cars, more would be the days of having really deep talk about futures and careers, wives and kids, old age and coffins. It is a new stage, a new beginning; a clear path towards our destiny, well at least that was what I thought.
This blog is inspired from Blendi Feruku, my supervisor at work, and Sir Ken Robinson, who is an amazing TED speaker that I discovered on YouTube.
Blendi is a Senior Temporary Works Engineer in the company and he is my supervisor, he was very passionate about his job. In fact he is so passionate about his job whenever he is a bit free he would come over to my desk and start explaining every equation in my design, making sure I understand everything about my design. I have learnt so much about engineering from him than from my university. Anyways, he told me today he had a degree in Medicine. I thought it was some sort of a joke, but no. He pulled out his first degree from Albania, and he told me he spent two years as a GP. Then he decided he wanted to be an engineer, so he moved his family to England, started fresh, got a civil and structural engineering degree and started work in the industry, and now here he is, sitting next to a fresh graduate who makes quite a lot of stupid mistakes and mentoring every of his step into being a better civil engineer.
Was being a civil engineer part of his plan? Probably not when he was trying to get into med school. I mean, if you want to be an engineer why would you take the trekked path to become a doctor and then a civil engineer? It was a dramatic change for sure, but in the end he was happier. Good on him, life works out.
Next I am going to talk about a story I heard from Sir Ken Robinson in his speech about passion.
When Ken was publishing this book called The Arts in School in 1980, he had this editor who was in her late 30s, and she had only been an editor about five years before then. When she was asked what she used to do before, she said she used to be a concert pianist, and a successful one too. The big change happened when she was giving a concert in the Purell Room in South Bank and at the end of the concert, she went off to have dinner with the conductor. During then while the conductor praised her performance in the concert, he noticed she was only good at it, she did not like it. Then she realised she only had taken everything for granted, went to musical school, finished all the guildhall exams and ta-da, performed in front of hundreds of thousands. She never thought whether she liked it or not, she only knew she did it because she was good at it. She loved reading books, she loved being around with writers, and she did not know that was a available life for her because the idea of that never came across her mind. Now she is a writer and she had never been happier. Never been poorer, but never been happier either.
This happens because we were brought up with an idea that life is linear, and that idea has perpetuated us when we are writing our CVs, that we set our lives in a series of dates and achievements in a linear way, and that it gives us an impression that we are in control of what we are doing and that our lives is not the random series of chaotic events, but instead we take opportunities and we respond to them.
Living in your own happiness, or as Sir Ken put it, living in your element, does not necessarily make financial richness, it is more of an spiritual richness. Spending time doing whatever it is that we love to do and we can be physically exhausted by it, but spiritually uplifted; but if we are doing things we don’t give a dime about at the end of the day we can feel physically fine but spiritually down and needing to lift ourselves up again.
Would it ever be too late to change? Probably never, as long as you dare to step up and change your game.
But who could guess what could happening later in life? The worst feeling in the world would probably be uncertainty, but it is always during uncertainties that opportunities come and you life flourishes.