As some of you will know, I started my working life as an actor and dancer. There is something surreal about seeing your face on the side of a bus, advertising a particular production. The theatre wasn’t for me long term, and after my ‘dabble’ in performance arts I trained as a teacher and quickly moved into teacher training and lecturing at university level, which then led me to teaching Pilates.
Now I find myself running the Resolving Chronic Pain clinic and while my background as a movement specialist and my skills as a teacher are both fundamental to my current work, I could never have imagined myself doing this back when I was desperately trying to learn the words and musical rhythm for the lead role advertised on the side of those buses.
One of the most positive ways in which life has changed in this country in recent years is that people are no longer expected to find one career and stick to it for the rest of their lives, even if it doesn’t suit them. We are given the freedom to choose, and while that may have negative effects, as discussed in a previous blog, it also presents us with a world of opportunity if we don’t like where we are just now.
In fact, one of the greatest challenges now faced by those unhappy with their careers is that of finding the courage to start again. It’s easy to feel ‘too old’ to take a new direction. This is ridiculous, because age is relative – I know 20-year-olds who feel ‘too old’ to get on the path they want, which I think we can all agree is a little preposterous, and which proves that age is all about mindset anyway.
Gladys Burrill, to use a famous example of someone who picked up something new very late in life, ran her first marathon in 2004 at 86 years old. She became famous after finishing the Honolulu Marathon at 92 – she walked/jogged it, but she still got all the way round, and in nine hours 53 minutes which is no mean feat.
Helen Glover was a lot younger when she changed direction – just 23. But in further proof that age is relative, that is widely considered late to take up a professional sport. Helen did, and just four years later at the age of 27, she won Gold in the coxless pair at the 2012 Olympics.
John Crace, the British journalist, turned his life around in a different way at 30. He found himself addicted to heroin, having ‘annihilated my entire twenties’, he wrote in GQ magazine. But Crace pulled himself out of a hole, went to rehab, started writing, and now has a family and a career. He writes about it still being a daily struggle, but his life is immeasurably different to how it was 30 years ago.
Brendon Gleeson was in his mid-thirties when he gave up his job teaching Irish and English at the now-closed Belcamp College in Dublin, although he had trained as an actor before taking the teaching job.
Alan Rickman studied graphic design for five years after leaving school, and even went so far as to open a graphic design studio. After three years of successful business he decided to change direction and pursue an acting career.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as Grandma Moses, was an American folk artist. She worked on farms churning butter and making crisps until she and her husband bought their own farm, which Anna ran for decades. At the age of 76 she developed arthritis, and turned to painting as a hobby she could easily do despite her condition. She took up painting at 78, and became a world-famous artist before her death aged 101 in 1961.
It’s interesting to look back at the winding direction life can take you on, and it’s exciting to think of what might be to come. I hope some of these stories have inspired you to appreciate the twists and turns of your life or to consider new possibilities.