A few years ago, I worked in an archive. Large collections of individuals’ and organisations’ papers would be donated to us for safekeeping. My job was to sort through those sometimes impenetrably messy collections and find some order in them to make them accessible to researchers.
When faced with these boxes of disorder, it was easy to feel overwhelmed. You felt like you’d never make sense of them at all. But each day, I would tackle it, and each morning, I’d be faced with a little less mess and a little more order. At the end of sometimes months of work, I had an inventory and neatly lined up boxes of a sorted collection to show for it.
That job taught me something about change. When we hear about people overcoming odds, or their lives changing for the better, it can seem as if life, for some, is an exciting series of victorious moments. That job taught me that in reality, change often happens by putting one step in front of another, one day at a time.
Here are three examples of my change moments that didn’t arrive in a flash of good fortune, but took good, old fashioned hard work:
Becoming debt-free
That glorious moment when you finish paying off a large debt is just around the corner for me. It’s so close that I’m beginning to visualise the day when I make my final payment and say goodbye to what was an enormous burden for so long. That moment won’t be happening because I won the lottery, or because someone gave me a break. It’ll happen because I faithfully paid my installments, month after month, for five years.
Graduating with a Master’s degree
I’m writing a Master’s thesis at the moment. I’ve been saying that for the past year. I’m sure it’s a boring topic to most of my friends by now, because I’ve been at it for so long. But I can see the finish line. That moment when I graduate will be a huge triumph. But it won’t have come because I decided one evening to write something and then breezed through the research process. It’ll come as a result of sitting with it almost every night for hours, or for days over the weekend. It’ll come because drafts of chapters have been batted backwards and forwards between me and my supervisor. It’ll come because even when I wasn’t writing, I was grappling with concepts. It’ll come because I chose to write one word at a time.
From Librarian to Communications manager
I qualified as a librarian more than 20 years ago. For more than 20 years, I worked in libraries and archives. One day last year, I received a call telling me that my application for a job in Media and Communications had been successful. A huge change that didn’t come because I was lucky, or because I’d had a sudden change of heart. It was after a long process of making sure I was appropriately skilled: experimenting with social media and applying it in the libraries I worked in; writing academic papers, popular articles and blog posts whenever I got the chance to hone my writing skills; training in web development and applying my new skills to my workplace. Changing my career path after 20 years wasn’t so much a lightbulb moment as one that evolved after years of hard work and preparation.
Those archival boxes I used to sort turned into ordered collections because I picked up each piece of paper, one at a time. Life can be like that. Triumphant moments, born out of choosing to stick with something that might seem difficult or mundane, day after day.
Leave a Reply