One can't always tell what will matter in the future. Last year I signed up to do volunteer work teaching mathematics to children in a nearby primary school, and a year later, I met and spoke with the Queen because of that decision. Who would have guessed? All my work on the college council meant nothing, as a new team was elected under a month before The Queen's visit! Lucky buggers! Reminds me of how Joseph ended up being Pharaoh's number two, despite his downs and downs in his early years in Egypt; one just can't tell how things will turn out. I like the way Steve Jobs put it - you can only connect the dots looking backwards.
The beautiful thing about connecting the dots is you may not have to change your location or vocation when you connect them; you may be in the same exact situation, one you'd grown used to, but all of a sudden you get it, and everything makes sense. Things seem right, and you appreciate what you have a lot more. It's like C.S. Lewis said, and I'm paraphrasing big-time here, when he said something like "we arrive where we started from and recognise it for the first time." That's what happened to me yesterday.
We went back to the primary school for the first time this school year, and started working with a new set of students. Same school, same classroom, same subject, just younger students. But things had changed for me. Not in some radical, out of the world way. It was just a quiet, unassuming realisation that what we do with the kids really does matter. Even if we only help one child develop their skills in mathematics, it does matter. It matters enough that two of us from the group were introduced to The Queen. It matters enough that we had pictures of the other group members on a board for her to see. We would not have been introduced if what we do doesn't count.
And it mattered all the more yesterday because two of us worked with an incredibly bright boy from a minority background, who likes mathematics and history, and also plays the violin (he's been playing for three years). He loves to learn, and he totally engaged both of us for the entire 90 minutes we spent with him. It was such a joy seeing things through his eyes. I have had experiences like these in the past, but yesterday I connected the dots, and I understood, at a very visceral level, what many people have said about how doing things one enjoys can make a way for one in the world.
Whatever you enjoy doing, do more of it. Become prodigious - produce, invest time, just do it. There's no way to be certain where doing so will take you, but at least you'll enjoy the ride. And if you do end up in a fantastic position, you'll enjoy that, as well as the pleasure of being able to look back and connect the dots. And I guarantee that'll bring a smile to your face, like it did to mine yesterday.
