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Career Drift, Standing On Your Own Two Feet and

Cadres music: Sea Drift
Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore;
I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

WALT WHITMAN

1. Life Drift
The curriculum vitae is all too often reduced to the
curriculum mortis as life goes on and events shape our
life, not we it. Employers never realize this.
While the employment paradigm is sadly based on the
obviously untrue Romantic shibboleth that men shape
their destinies, and are masters of their fate.
The great thing about life is that there can be global
meltdown and wonderful change for the better; but most
of the time we are too earth-bound to appreciate mans
endless potential for renewal.
2. Standing On Your Own Two Feet
England lacks the traditional nuclear family, where
members live, by and large, alongside one another in a

single, maybe large, family property which is passed

down from one generation to the next. The Jane Austen
paradigm.
Post-war British society from the late Sixties onward
became splintered, aspirational and upwardly mobile.
Perhaps secretly resentful of the easier life which lay
ahead for their children, Seventies parents tended to
favour the birds nest metaphor of family life, obliging
their offspring to leave home at eighteen.

Twenty-one had traditionally been the age of majority;

and its lowering in the UK in 1969 was an additional
factor increasing pressure on people who came of age in
the seventies. But at that time, we just got on with our
destinies. It is only forty years later that I fully realize the
stresses we were under, and meet the incomprehension
of the Georgians that family life could have been
organized like this: and their incredulity that there is no
property, no domain, nothing back in England that now
aged sixty I can call my home. Hence my allegience to
Georgia; hence also the music by Delius that
accompanies this piece: a Requiem for lost youth and lost

opportunities... Loss, however, is almost always followed

up by fresh chances...
3 Career Drift
Career Drift is frequently to be spotted in the UK work
model; although it has not to my knowledge been
defined before.
Continental Europe and the post-Soviet countries operate
again off a quite different template. A major factor,
too, in career drift is the British governments
employment policy, especially the mandatory
requirement that those looking for work must take, if not
the first job which comes up, at least one very soon after
that.
A really interesting question arises here, about the very
nature of work.
Joseph Conrad famously wrote: I dont like work no
man does but I like what is in the work, - the chance to
find yourself. Your own reality for yourself, not for others
what no other man can ever know. They can only see
the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
The curriculum vitae unfortunately and this is strange
for something so axially concerned with work! operates
in complete isolation from this cardinal reality; with the
result that no employer is ever able to hire a man on the
basis of any spiritual qualities he may possess. As Conrad
has hinted, they remain a secret between himself and the
guardian spirits of his work.

Ronald Blythes classic study of an East Anglian village,

Akenfield, also has a key insight about work. It comes
from the village blacksmith, Gregory Gladwell: You are a
tradesman; this is the highest thing. Making, doing;.
Meanwhile his award-winning apprentice says: Ill be
quite honest with you; I havent any faith in myself. I
dont expect to be able to do anything. When it is done, I
am pleased and surprised. But the faith is beginning to
come now...
In this rustic world we see how a sense of perfection
pervades the work of the smith, the wheelwright, the
thatcher and even the ploughman: the book refers
especially to Suffolk in the 1920s and 1930s.
Now the problem for someone suffering from career drift
is twofold: how to choose, from a banal smorgasbord of
available jobs, almost none of them pertaining to an
actual trade, something which will satisfy ones striving
for perfection, and yet not exhaust one completely (for
one has to bear constantly in mind the neti-neti of the
Vedanta, neither this, nor that). Ones vocation the
work where one will most truly express oneself if indeed
destiny eventually brings it to one presumably lies
futher down the track.
The educator and craftsman Leslie R. Perry also said,
Nobody should be expected to stay in a form of
employment that bores them; they should be helped to
make more meaningful connections between their work
and their interests. How many lives have been stifled by

boredom; and how very few people have truly found their
authentic trade, vocation and calling!
In the UK, the ruling idea has been that people should
work at all costs; not that they should work at what
interests them, or what they may have a talent to do. Or
at least, this second aim has sometimes surfaced by
implication in training programs, but it is a very hit and
miss affair, within which nothing of the gravitas and
sanctity of work that is apparent in the Akenfield
craftsman can be discerned.
I have tried to keep an incohate intuition of such values
alive and fresh during my many years in professions
where everyone always said I was under-employed. This
both was and was not true. I chose openings which would
always leave my powder dry, and not exhaust my
idealism or my energy completely. It was a waiting game.
And with a view to always keeping the hidden, inner,
philosophical things alive outside working hours. I think I
have succeeded. In fact, I know that I have.

4 Cadres
A further malaise of our time is the downgrading of
vocation and profession to cadre : whereby those
employed as school teachers, for example, must have
passed through a training system requring assent to
many dubious pedagogic dogmas. Such a system which
is pre-programmed to filter out the most brilliant minds as
future schoolteachers provides a strong disincentive to
the creative spirits among us. Those really concerned
with education rather than just being a teacher will have
to take what the Latvian-Canadian violinist Harry Adaskin
referred to as the long way round a path which in the
end, he tells us, is always the shortest route. While I saw
that a few of my contemporaries at university who had
developed early enough in their lives a clear and
unalloyed vision of a profession which interested them;
and who then made a huge effort and a precise leap
exactly into the niche which suited them, I always felt
that this was exceptional, not the norm. Too soon, in
many other cases, the pack-ice would close again, and
the vessel, whether the Raft of the Medusa or Scotts
Terra Nova, would be left stranded.
Recovery from such an impasse, if it truly comes, calls for
much celebration; and needs one to defy at any rate to
some extent the narrow circumscription of the
curriculum vitae or as I have called it the curriculum
mortis . It came about by chance and will not go away.

This document in demand from employers, and those

with whom Saint-Exuprys Little Prince would advise us
to talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties
needs nontheless to be written. But in the end, important
as it is, it will lie adjacent to ones true business, ones
true purpose, and be but little related to the energy that
drives one to struggle beyond the merely contingent to
find the satisfactions of a real and fulfilling branch of
work.
Let the blacksmith in Akenfield have the last word; for I
think he sees the issue very clearly, and gives us a true
vision of the centrality of what can only be described as a
spiritual vision of work:
We have our pressures now with the bills and bank
managers and book-keeping, but I say to myself, this is
not the highest thing; this is business...I wont have life all
spoilt by money...When we do a big job we have to work.
This is understood. Eventually, we get through it. A big
job is a big experience.