“I come from down in the valley, where mister when you’re young, they bring you up to do, just like your Daddy done”. Well, my Daddy worked in a brewery and while I love beer, my parents had greater ambitions. Unfortunately, the limit of that ambition is that they didn’t want me to have to wear overalls in whatever job I ended up in.
Forty-three years ago, I was
studying hard for my school leaving exams. I grew up on a street that the poet
Patrick Kavanagh famously described as one that he wouldn’t bring a bucket of
shit down, in case the shit got a bad name. But in my secondary school years, I
had delusions of grandeur and attached myself to the kids who grew up on the
smart side of town. The sort of people who lived in houses that weren’t stuck
to other houses and had front gardens.
The talk at school in January
1982 was all about college courses. Some of my friends wanted to do medicine,
some engineering and some business and marketing. I had no idea what I wanted
to do. I had no ambition to pursue a particular career or to change the world.
In the end, I applied to do an arts degree, which is the course taken by people
who just want to drink and meet girls at Uni.
In the end, I didn’t even do
that. My Dad was on strike for a lot of my final year and money was tight. My
Mother was nothing if not practical and she didn’t see the financial sense in
shelling out lots of dosh when I had no plan for my life.
I swallowed my pride and headed
back to my careers teacher from school and asked if he could help me find a
job. I think I had the idea that I’d work for a year and then self-fund my own
glittering college career. However, the job he found me was in an Accountancy
office, where I was initially paid less that a paperboy would earn. After the
first year, I found that I was good at accounting and could see a future with
lots of money and a job that would satisfy my ego’s desire to present myself as
a success.
Now I’m hurtling at full speed
towards sixty and finding that I’m drawn towards introspection and questioning
my values for the first time. I fully accept that this is a luxury offered to
those of us with money and time. I’m sure my Dad never spent time wondering if
his creativity values were being met while he was cleaning out a brewing tank.
I have often wondered why I ended
up in a job that I never even considered studying at school. Why do I do it
when it results in so much stress and pressure? And why have I lived in five
different countries and have now settled as far away as possible from where I
was born?
I recently set out on a journey
to try to understand this. To figure what my values are and the bigger
questions in life, such as why am I here and where am I going? And is there a
returns policy?
I have filled out questionnaires
and completed on-line studies. I have stared into my soul and asked all the
difficult questions of myself.
And my conclusion is that I’m
quite happy with who I am.
My personality is creative, I
love the Arts, from movies to theatre to books. I’m fascinated by history and
politics, and I crave friendships that make me laugh. I also love adventure.
Doing things for the first time and seeing as much of the world as possible.
But I also have an insecurity
born out of my working-class upbringing that means that I want to be
financially comfortable.
All in all, this tells me that I
pursued a career that I wasn’t particularly excited by but was relatively competent
in. However, it has provided the financial security to pursue all my other
interests. It has paid for exotic holidays to exciting places, allowed me to
perform on stage, go to the theatre and write blogs like this.
But most of all, I’ve made great
friends through work, and this has satisfied my needs for humour and fun.
My need for adventure and to see
the world has been met through work transfers that brought me to Luxembourg,
Singapore and Melbourne.
To borrow a term from the accounting
world, my Balance Sheet of life is looking healthy. On the asset side, I have
lots of friends, a book in the process of being published, a loving wife and
daughter and enough money to do the things I want to do.
On the liability side, my job
gives me stress and parenting can be exhausting. I also feel like my body is
aching in the places where it used to play. All of that means that I would love
to go bungy jumping and head to the theatre once a week, but struggle to find
the energy or time to do either.
In short, it seems that instead
of trying to find a world that met my values, I have adapted my values to the
environments I found myself in. At work, I look for creative and intellectually
stimulating tasks. I seek out friendships and fun in the office and I use the
money they pay me to pursue the things that really please me. That includes
paying me to go to places I never would have gone to otherwise. This is why I
have been able to work for rapacious American banks whose internal values don’t
align with mine.
I have never been defined by the
job I do. It’s a chore that gives me some positives and the freedom to follow
my dreams outside work. The problem comes when work is all consuming like it is
for me currently. But that is next week’s story.
