One of the great things about working for a sleep company is that every so often you get to lie on the floor for the day and get paid for it. It's the little things in life, but it's the little things that make up life. It wasn't until late 2011 that I learned that terrifying fact; "eventually the short term becomes the long term". Revolutionary. Empowering. Terrifying.
In school when I was trying to choose a third level course I did what most students did and took aptitude tests. My ambivalence toward my own future, partly brought on by the chemical lethargy induced by being coeliac, meant that I was happy to run with whatever I was good at. Preference by attraction wasn't high on the list of influences.
Unfortunately, I was told I was equally amazing at everything, which aside from being unhelpful, reaffirmed my teenaged suspicion that I was in fact the brightest spark in creation and that contrary to the blasphemous claims of modern physics, I was the center of the universe.
After that some time passed, deadlines loomed, and in the end I chose Engineering because I was lead to believe I wasn't actually making a choice. I wanted to postpone the whole business of choosing a future until I had some opinion on it, and I was told I could go anywhere with an Engineering degree behind me.
When the Leaving Cert results arrived, I was pleased to discover I had enough points to get into the course, and baffled to discover that English was my best subject, with Physics trailing at poorest. And so the degree, originally an inconsequential whim in the grand flow of my life, became a looming task before me.
I spent the first two years in denial. I read novels in the back of mathematics lectures, skipped thermodynamics to drink coffee and read poetry, and whenever I had a lyrical thought I scribbled it on a scrap of paper or a notebook. I gig'd and composed, grew my hair and wore out my shoes.
Of course four years later I graduated and to my astonishment it was considerably easier to get a job in Engineering than in any of those other areas I had not ruled out yet. I started working in a company on the grounds of the college to earn some quick money while I looked for a proper job.
It's now eight months on and I am still working in that company. I've since increased in pay and opinions, implemented some databasing solutions, and done stints in China working in mass production of electronics.
I hate databasing.
This brings me on to the second point. One my boss would repeat to me with a cheeky grin whenever he asked me to do something repetitive or boring. "Be careful what you're good at."
Everyone up to that point had encouraged me to learn everything I could as fast as I could as well as I could and yet here was a man who had lived a life very similar to mine telling me to take another look at the playing field.
And so I did. And I am. And every day these two snippets of wisdom chisel away into my reality, becoming more defining in my life, giving balance to things previously unquestioned. I have a fondness of how them that goes beyond the aesthetic and the lyrical. A fondness for their inward facing foreign perspective.
And truth be told, he most important thing you'll ever see is yourself through another person's eyes.
