Have you ever turned your computer on and it starts doing an update? After sitting on your desk collecting dust all weekend, at the moment you actually need it, your told to wait 37 minutes and please do not unplug the power source. Sometimes I think life is like that.
After three and a half years I needed to pick up my life and figure out what’s next. And I saw nothing but a blue screen and a spinning wheel. The whir of the internal fan told me I was breathing and the glow of the keyboard gave me some hope of better things to come. But updates, however inconvenient, are there to make your computer better (most of the time anyway — don’t ask my Dad his thoughts on OS updates).
Everyone talks about the stress of a PhD. The tiresome work, the long hours, the constant revisions. Pushing to meet deadlines which seem unachievable. It’s a high stress period with the sweet hope of relief when it’s finally submitted.
This was not my experience.
Although the last 6 months of thesis writing were brutal it’s nothing compared to the anxiety of “what next?”. Dedicating three and a half years of your life to a single project, to gain what is basically the highest level of qualification (although I would argue recent awards to Taylor Swift somewhat discredit this statement), is a long journey to take and arrive at disappointment. To be back where you started as if it didn’t happen. Like the round trip to the supermarket, returning with a full bag of groceries but missing the one item your wife asked you to get. You scuttle in the front door sheepishly cursing the half price pack of AA batteries you were suckered into knowing full well all your devices are AAA’s. And so fear and doubt seep into your consciousness. What was the point? Why now? Do I really need this existential crisis? And does James Cameron really need to make MORE Avatar movies?
I am generally a patient man. I tolerate people well but being patient for my own inadequacies’ is not easy. I get undone by kindness. The soft expression on your friends faces. The gentle politeness rounding the edge of their voice as hollow words attempt to take the sting out of a lousy situation. “Something will come up”. “The right role is just around the corner”. And they may very well be right. The hardest part is it only takes one phone call and a signature to bury your despair. Waiting is one thing. But waiting without knowing how long is another. And waiting without knowing how long or why you have to wait at all is something else altogether.
Countless blue tailfins pierce a sunny Californian sky outside the hustling terminal of San Fransico International Airport. While Ron Burgundy taught me the meaning of San Diego I’m unsure the origin of this foreign city’s name. Somehow, within the space of a week, I’ve gone from eating mi goreng in my jocks and being familiar with daytime television to working in the world of international sport. Basically, I’ve traded watching movies at home to watching movies in planes. And so outside of gate E8 my computer has finally booted up. In an instant the misery of waiting is extinguished. The wave of relief hits like a cold shower — in many ways it’s too fast. I’m shocked at how quick I am to forget the immediate past. How quickly we can move on to the task at hand now that we finally can. I’m learning sometimes the challenge in life is to remember the hurt and the frustration. To examine history and discover the lessons that will support our future. That’s something Ash and I are trying to implement in our lives. Because although there are countless lessons we have learned there is one that sticks out. It’s that life is actually not like an updating computer. Life is like a book. And although some chapters can be long, painful or boring, once you’re past them, they still exist. The words remain printed on the pages and at any moment you can flick back to them, to remind yourself how the protagonists grew and how the story developed. How important each detail and encounter was during the journey, and the relationships which were crucial to get you to the next chapter.
Lucky for you all I’m not writing a book. I don’t have the creative agility to bring imagination to life. So you won’t have to endure anything longer than a five-minute read. Blogs will continue to be some form of self-serving public therapy and are a terrific opportunity to tell a joke or two without having to be there when it doesn’t land. Ash and I are indebted to many of you who continued to have our back through some challenging recent months. We can’t even try and repay that debt in any way but we will pass it on in kind to the next person who needs it when we can. So after all these turns and roundabouts it seems only fitting to leave you with a Michael Scott quote:
“I knew exactly what to do… but in a much more real sense, I had no idea what to do”