I’ve often said I was born to be an engineer. I love designing and building things, taking things apart to see how they work, playing with tools. While I love to consume the arts, I dislike doing them. I’m shy, reclusive, socially awkward, misanthropic and don’t get me started on the ADHD.
Look, squirrel.
But, as I mentioned before, while all these are traits of the engineer, what if some of them were learned, and not innate? Might I have been, like my mother, an artist? Like my father, a doctor?
We’ll never know.
What I do know is that, from the moment I latched onto the idea of becoming a Mechanical Engineer, I pursued it single mindedly until I got there. A few years later, I realized that I don’t want to do it any longer.
There used to be a talk show host on Kitchener AM 570 whose father referred to the “golden handcuffs.” He didn’t particularly like his job, but they paid him too well to quit.
I no longer particularly love my career. In fact, I no longer have a career, just a job, and if it didn’t feed, house and clothe my family, I would no longer be doing it.
Maybe I wasn’t born to be an engineer, after all.
But that opens the question, “What was I born to do?”
