Take the Train that's Leaving
I like leaving dos. I always try to go to them. They are a formal marking of the end of a job and I think that they are a good thing to support. I will admit that my own leaving dos have been a bit poor over the years – sometimes well-attended but people leave early and sometimes sparsely attended and lasting too long – but I have decided over the years that that must just be down to people being genuinely sad that I am leaving. Either that or they thinking of my record of employers who have collapsed within a year of me leaving them.
A few weeks ago I was at a leaving do for someone who I have never worked with (and yet who I know through work). I think that this is a considerable achievement. I managed to leave that particular workplace about a month before she started in it, so it was still worth going out to celebrate having almost worked with her. This blog is going to be full of quotes, so at this point I will add in one of my mother’s favourites from a cruise ship singer she once heard – “We passed like sheep in the night.”
After several hours of general celebration, there was a suggestion that we moved from Cardiff Bay to the city centre. Some people wanted to ‘take an Uber’. I do not ‘take Ubers'. This is partly due to the gig economy and so on, but most recently I object to them doubling their prices for those caught up in the London Bridge terror attacks. Uber’s response was that they have automatic pricing that reflects demand so, of course, when people start fleeing a terrorist attack, the initial automated response will be to significantly increase fares due to demand. Alternatively, you can call it profiting from terrorism and contrast it with the response of taxi drivers who have responded to terrorist attacks in Britain by not charging to take people away from the scene. I know which activity I want to support.
The alternative to an Uber was to take a train. It should be a six minute journey from Cardiff Bay to Cardiff Queen Street though the emphasis of this would be ‘should be’. However, before we start on that journey, I want to tell you about the conversation I had while I was at the train station wondering if I should tell people about Uber’s record on terrorism.
One of my former colleagues (a man who I had worked with, in case you were wondering), started talking about a woman who he was interested in. I emphasise that I did not know the situation and I would not have commented but for the fact that when questioned about her he talked about being cautious, not saying anything and ‘seeing how things developed’. This annoyed me a little.
I gave him the advice you have read in these blogs many times, “If you want the fruit to fall, you have to give the tree a shake.” If you subscribe to the Facebook FanPage ‘The Books and Music of Dewi Heald’ you can even see a video of me shaking a tree to make that point. I had forgotten that this was the Twitter generation however and he rounded on me for ‘thinking that women are fruit’.
I have come across this on Twitter often. It would seem that comparisons, metaphors and any other kind of explaining something by comparing it to something else goes over the heard of twitter users. Everything seems very literal. Perhaps it is the limit of 140 characters or perhaps it really is that we are losing the ability to deal with examples of one thing applied to another. Nothing says youth to me no quite like taking everything literally ... well, hold that thought.
I tried to explain to him that caution is all very well, but that time is limited. If you want good things to happen in your life, then you have to take some action towards achieveing them. Sitting back and waiting for the fruit to drop may not work so why not give the tree a shake now? Life goes by quickly and you need to take the opportunities that are presented to you. At this point I was expanding beyond the particular circumstance he was in and trying to explain the principle more widely. He was having none of it. He knew that things happen if they are meant to happen, a common excuse for doing nothing to help them happen. Nothing says youth to me quite like thinking that you have years and years to achieve anything you want so there is no point in getting on with it now.
For older people, it is the philosophy of the bucket list. Unless you are shopping for buckets, throw away your bucket list and do it now.
At this point, you may ask yourself how this fits with a couple of my other favourite quotes. What about ‘all good things come to s/he who waits’? That to me is about patience. All the best things do take patience, but they do not take passivity. You can be patient while also working to make something happen. For instance, now you have torn up your bucket list and intend to go backpacking in Peru, you may have to wait patiently while you save up the money to do it. Just tell the children that Father Christmas is not coming this year because a funny man on the internet told Mummy that she had to go to Peru.
What about “if you stand by the river and wait for long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float past.”? I once quoted this at a Quaker Conference and was told off by someone for using such a military analogy. That was taking things a little literally but we have mentioned that problem already. To me, that is about not wasting your energy on unnecessary battles. You can stay true to your own principles and let your enemies kill each other in the meantime. Agan, it is not about inaction, it is about knowing not to fight certain battles.
Ta-dah! Look how a coherent philosophy is emerging from nowhere!
The train journey turned out to be torturous and strange. The train reached Cardiff Queen Street but Arriva Trains Wales clearly saw the station as only a concept on this particular night as we were not allowed to leave the building and were redirected on to another train. My colleague was not convinced at all by talk of trees and shaking and maintained his belief in caution and inactivity (‘if it’s meant to be, then it’s meant to be" – another excuse for inaction which then rewards you for your wisdom if things do not work out for you because of your inaction). I have no idea if he should have approached this woman or not, but I do know that I have written too many blogs over the years telling people that life goes quickly and that you have to take the opportunities that come your way and yet the messages never quite percolates through.
Of course, not all decisions leads to great places. It was some time before we were allowed out of a station and then we had to walk to the next drinking venue. The six minute train ride was more like twenty in the end. However, sometimes you have to suffer for your principles. That includes going to venues where a band plays '80s classics' as if they were all in the charts on the same day and loud, drunk men shout at each other (one of them sold me a used car once - curse that memory for faces, I have). I enjoyed it though because, that is rather the whole point of this, it was not time that I was going to waste.