The Forks of Life

When you have not quite lived even a quarter of a century long, the journey of life up to this point for lucky folk, has seemed fairly straight forwards.

You go to school... you go to university... you get a job...

There are few questions about if's, but's or even when's along the way... it's more about the where and the what.

And it's only over the last few years, as many of my school friends finished their arts degrees, that I realised that as a result, we end up somewhat ill-prepared for what's to come: real life.

Unused to uncertainty, all of a sudden we feel like the ground has been taken away from our feet; the pathway no longer lit up for us.

Last week, all final year medical students around the country applied for their first jobs as "foundation year doctors". This involves essentially ranking all the areas (known as "deaneries") of the UK. We then take a test in December, and your overall ranking in the country determines which of the areas you get sent to. You would think we shouldn't have a problem - it's true, at least we are almost guaranteed a job, and the path couldn't be much clearer. But the amount of panic of having to contemplate being thrown to areas of the UK where light may not touch, was surprising even to those of us who pretend to be good at keeping calm. And even after the forms had been sent off, the panic in some seemed to linger.

Of course, I count myself as one of the panickers... wary of change, of what may come, where I might end up. But a wiser voice in my head says that what will come will come, and that actually it's quite exciting, maybe probably :)

I guess what I'm trying to say is, think of it not as an abyss... but the cusp... of something new, and therefore potentially good. And we don't have to know what that good thing is now, tomorrow, next year or the year after that. But remember at the end of the day, we're all in this life together :)

And hey at least it's a fork, not a knife... the other piece of cutlery that can change the course of life..!

...Adventures await!


“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”  
― Gilda Radner