Career direction

In the last issue of Look magazine, the periodical of the Art Gallery Society that comes once a month and hangs out in my bathroom waiting to be read, there's an article on a woman who will be curating a big show of Islamic art later this year. She got the gig through a friend, sort of by accident, because her PhD was more in history than art, and at the end of the article it said, "While she is enjoying the work - and her first taste of Australia - it has helped her decide that she probably wants her career to take a more academic direction, and most likely in a [natural history] museum than an art gallery."

I read this and was startled by one of those feelings that marks the fact that you're past a certain boundary in life, that you've grown older and have changed in fundamental ways. This time it was the notion of a "career direction". I remember the old, nearly constant panic and feeling of obligation to figure out what I was going to DOOOOO, and the compulsion to try on every profession that I ran across as a possible candidate. "Orchid farmer? Maybe I should be an orchid farmer. I should, I should go get some horticulture books right now and spend my weekends reading them...."

But reading the article in Look I suddenly realised that the old familiar panicky companion is now completely gone. Gone. Utterly. I don't have a career direction, I have a career. I'm here. I've arrived. It's right here, this is exactly what I do and want to do and have been working toward doing. I think the magic combination that got me here - to my career destination, not my career direction - is the combination of the web day job and the philosophy stuff on the side, as a kind of serious avocation.

Amazing. Strange feeling but good - I suppose it's always good when you see the back of an old panicky feeling. And the main sense I have is of lots of time freed up, to have experiences and fun and learn new things just for well-roundedness and not because they might one day be supposed to define me.

Good luck, Islamic history chickie. But I am older than you, and I don't have to worry about career direction any more. I'm there.