Now that I have nephews and nieces in either tertiary education or working for a living, pronouncing eagerly on their plans for the future, engaging with life full on and enjoying the challenge, making decisions with square-jawed confidence, I wonder whether I was like that at their age.
I've concluded that I must have been, at least up to a point, though I do remember being talked out of my biggest early-adulthood decision (about where to go to university) and still having a sense of regret about it thirty years later. ( I knew I'd drawn a short straw when, on explaining to the Master's wife that I had come to do modern languages, she declared in a Dame Sybil Thorndyke voice, that it was a good choice, as there were excellent opportunities in lexicography. Talk about an arrow to the heart...)
I was overruled into that safer, more establishment option, which proved to be a disaster a year later when I left, in what I still remember now as my first "adult" decision. Though of course, I still appear on the college records as a member, despite not taking a degree there. A bit like the Hotel California - you can check out, but you can never leave.
This is one of the sadder aspects of arriving at mid-life; where did all that sure-foootedness go? Where did the unblinking attack give way to this semi-permanent sense of equivocation, of hedging, of preventing failure? I can't speak for women, never having been one, but I reckon most blokes who've arrived at the age of 45 or more will understand that sense of progress ebbing away, of being overlooked, of knowing that your best just isn't going to be possible, of being assigned to manage something when what you wanted was a project, a quest, a pickaxe and an open piece of land, a mad dream.
Perhaps I'm just not aggressive enough, Perhaps others play the game better than I do. Perhaps I'm lazy. All are true to a certain extent. But there's still 110% effort available in this carcass for something really worth doing. It's just that most of what I see around me doesn't seem worthwhile any more. Corporate life is a young man's game, and a small number who play well and play hard will make it further up the ladder, to continue the culture and perpetuate the myths.
How I'd love to have a new project for Part 2, one that re-engaged that clear-eyed single-mindedness that I still recall so vividly from time to time. One where everything just fell naturally into place in the magnetic field of a focused will.