Classical music
I listen to a great deal of classical music and review recordings and performances, partly because paying close attention to something difficult and beautiful is good practice for paying attention to anything else.
01 — Where I started
From the outside, nothing looked wrong.
- Work A job I had stopped believing in
- Body Fifteen kilos heavier than I am now
- Mind A doctorate postponed for years
- Evenings In bed at three, awake late and tired
For years I taught English and European policy, in a school, a college and a university, and by any reasonable measure things were going well enough. I had a salary, a timetable and a doctorate under way, and if you had asked me how I was I would have told you that I was fine, because there was nothing I could point to that was actually broken.
The truth was less tidy. I was overweight, I went to bed in the small hours and woke up late and tired, I had been postponing the doctorate for longer than I like to admit, and I was working in a job I had stopped believing in. None of this was dramatic enough to force a decision, which is exactly what made it so easy to live with, and I suspect it is the most common way for a life to go slightly wrong, through years of postponing a conversation with yourself.
Most of the advice I came across at the time did not help, because it seemed to have been written for a different kind of person. It asked me to become louder, more relentless and more conventionally ambitious than I am, and I knew that I would not keep that up for longer than a fortnight. What I needed was a way of changing my life that I could still recognise as my own, and since nobody was offering one, I began to work it out for myself, one small and fairly unglamorous step at a time.
I am telling you this because it is the reason I do this work, and because it is what I would want to know about anyone I was thinking of trusting with a decision of my own.