I am stumbling along, not knowing what I really want. I wish that one day I can finally, in a friend's words, 'see the big picture', and know what the hell I am doing with my life. But I think life is showing me a little light, bringing me to places that I didn't plan to, letting me see the things that I didn't expect to and realising maybe I was meant to be on a different path.
'The best way to help the poor is not to become one of them.'
Welcome to the pragmatic world of self-enhancement, greed, selfishness and total disregard of anything else except me, myself and I.
Office politics is hideous, especially when you come to the sudden realisation that you are wrapped right in the middle of it, with nowhere to run except to pretend that you are absolutely ignorant of the happenings around you and smile into your salad which you munch quietly away on your 1mx1m table, staring at your four interlinked screens pretending to be absorbing some sense of knowledge but in reality all you're doing is read the news headline and admiring trends that you don't understand while calculating p&l that you know that noone else will even look at anymore when you leave the firm to go back to school.
This is when you miss school life - waking up at 8am instead of getting to work by 7am, eating lunch in the school canteen rather than on your desk while simultaneously watching 4 screens with a few hundred figures moving all at the same time and people shouting obscenities every other second. You come to realise that there are things that you should appreciate while you can, and there are things that you will have to learn to tolerate and perhaps conform to in order to obtain some other goals in life. There is never a take-all; win some, lose some. You just have to decide which one to win, and which to lose.
A poem one of my colleagues, I think the head of covered bonds, wrote to us, when the stock market came crashing over the last week: IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, ' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
I really like the people in my company - they're the most hilarious bunch of people i've met in my sense of weird humour that only a rare few can understand, so it's been quite amazing to meet them at the place i intern in.
