Vocation-wise, there is a tradition of late development in our family. You could call us late bloomers, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t. My brother, my sister and I all left school unclear of our future paths, and one by one we found them – or, perhaps, they found us. I went into education, my brother entered the Church and my sister became a solicitor.
I’ve been known to joke that for the want of a close relative in the military, we could have been a Jane Austen novel. One of my nieces may be about to oblige in that respect. In a couple of weeks’ time, all being well, she will have completed her initial training to join the army. By all accounts she has risen to every challenge and is positively thriving. And as she is twenty-six and went straight from school to work, she is continuing in the family tradition rather nicely.
It sometimes crosses my mind that having parents whose only aspirations for us were to be ‘happy and healthy’ might have held us back in some way. There was never any pressure for us to go to university. How much more might we have achieved if, as in so many other families, there had been that almost implicit expectation of us from an early age? I sense we would have still ended up where we are now, only with a little less happiness and health.
When we left school with our various qualifications, it was a time when if you’d had a decent enough education you could get a decent enough job. I imagine my siblings, like me, enjoyed being out in the world of work. And when the enjoyment wore off, good fortune and a lot of hard work enabled us to pursue our different careers, as our parents cheered us on gently from the sidelines.
Today, the pressure for young people to aspire and achieve is greater than ever. I should know – I used to be an admissions tutor at a Cambridge college. A large part of my time was spent raising aspirations and encouraging school students to aim high in their university choices. Having left all that behind a couple of years ago, I’m still a great believer in the power of higher education to enrich and transform the lives of some young (and older) people, despite the threefold increase in fees.
But I believe equally in the rights of other young (and older) people to do things differently, so that the transformation can occur later, perhaps more circuitously, and definitely more than once. I’m enjoying my second (or possibly third) re-invention right now. I suspect that, over the years, the opportunities to make big life changes have greatly reduced for large sections of the population. I suspect that this is only going to get worse. But, every now and then I hear of someone, like my niece, who has found a vocation and I’m glad for them. Very glad.
The Power of Good Enough 
This post makes me so happy. You are right..some people step onto their path much later in life than others. As a teacher and a sixth form tutor I was always encouraging my students to make choices for themselves , rather than doing what their parents wanted them to do, or what the exam system had encouraged them to believe they had to do. University was pushed as the optimum choice after school, even though for many, it would have been much better for them to get some work experience, to get some LIFE experience, before making such serious choices as to what they would study and where they would go.
I was unusual in my own trajectory in that I ‘took a year out’ from studying, at a time long before the term ;’gap year’ had even been thought of. It did me the world of good to step off that track of academic study and work as a waitress in Bettys and then do voluntary work in a tough inner London school. I think I always knew I wanted to teach , and the year off didn’t put me off. But I was prepared to wait for it and when I did embark on a university degree, I was still open minded about what might happen at the end of it.
But despite myself, when my own son opted out of the educational system at 18 and chose not to go to university,despite having the ability and qualifications to do so, I felt disappointed.Me, who had encouraged so many other young people to ‘do something different’ was,hypocritically,disappointed that instead of choosing the path I had expected him to take, he went down completely different routes. Work:. He has always loved to work. Always had jobs from aged twelve onwards and today can literally turn his hand to almost any job.Travel: At 19, knowing no one, he traveled to New Zealand on his own , found work, places to live and learned new skills.He stayed for two years. He has traveled extensively and has recently returned from a year in Canada, where he loved his work as a window cleaner in the Rockies, surrounded by mountains and pine forests and turquoise blue rivers. He is back in England now,doing another manual job, which he enjoys. Not what I dreamed for him, but he IS happy and independent and confident and determined and can always find work whenever he looks for it. He loves to do try new things,Is ‘good at’ lots of diverse skills from cooking to photography, from rock climbing to salesmanship,from carpentry to music composition. He is a risk taker and an optimist,pragmatic and easy going and kind.He is,though I am his mother, a lovely young man. He’s not committed himself to one path yet, because he always sees that there are other roads to try.
So yes, ‘late bloomer’ that he is,coming up to 27 years old he still hasn’t chosen his’path’, if that means training in one ‘metier’ and sticking to it. But I know that he will. One day.but it might not be soon. It ‘s hard to wait on the sidelines for my dreams for him to materialise , and to accept that actually they are MY dreams, not his. And HE will make his own choice and somehow, I know it will be just right for him.
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Thanks Melanie, as the mother of a young person about to reach ‘adulthood’, I found reading this very reassuring & encouraging, Hxx
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