Matthew Munson: Routine, careers and creativity

Blink and you’ll miss it. Reality has well and truly re-started after the festive break. It’s nice to have a routine again, but I do miss the rest and relaxation of that two-week period; talk about a nice way to end the year.

We’re back to a fair, balanced, and even division of time between myself and Bryan. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s weighted in Bryan’s favour, but that’s the way it should be – he is invested in his dance lessons and school, and it’s a genuine pleasure to ensure he gets all these opportunities.

I had planned a few things for this weekend but decided to scale back a little; after a busy first week back to real life, I think a bit more down time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’re going to Bugsy’s Bowling on Sunday afternoon, which will be lovely; Hollywood Bowl is nice, but it’s good to go back to the one we’ve spent a lot of time in. Bryan is mostly looking forward to the pool tables, it seems, but I’m just going with the flow.

My creative side has taken a bit of a hit over the past few weeks (a combination of the Christmas break and starting a slightly new routine in the New Year to help us adjust to a few bits and pieces), so my belated New Year’s resolution is to get back on that particular horse. I am as passionate about words and language as Bryan is about dance, and my ambition from a young age was to be published; to share a story with an audience.

I ended up being fortunate enough to have three books published, as well as a novella, before fatherhood took over and I said farewell to the publishing company who had released my books. It would be lovely to have some more fiction published – it’s the ambition of a lot of writers, I would guess – but that’s in the hands of my ability to craft a story interesting enough to attract an agent and then a publisher.

I’m not staking my entire happiness on it, I should say; I’ve had a very diverse career. I’ve worked in supermarkets, libraries, a further education college, a couple of charities, local councils … well, I’ve moved around a bit. I’m thankful for the career I’ve had, even if a significant part of it wasn’t planned; I went where I was intrigued by a job, and it often branched out and evolved from there.

Bryan had a careers interview at school recently (something I wish had been around when I’d been at school), and I was fascinated when he told me all about it. The advisor was knowledgeable, interesting, and genuinely interested in giving Bryan the best advice he possibly could. It’s helped him focus a little bit, I suspect, and whereas I was pretty certain I could predict what he was going to do at 16, now I’m a little more on the fence. It goes without saying that I’ll support him no matter what.

I didn’t really have one single focus in the latter years of my teens. As I grew up, I had wanted to be a doctor, a nurse, a police officer, an actor (that didn’t last long), a chef, a baker, and a journalist … and possibly some others that I can’t remember. Journalist was the longest-serving ambition, but I gave it up when I realised that fiction was more of my passion than writing about real-life events (except in a weekly column for the esteemed Isle of Thanet News, of course). Inventing a world in the confines of my own head and then getting a novel-length story has always been more of my thing; I’ve always been fortunate to have a very active imagination.

The world we live in now is obviously going to be different to the one I grew up in, and that one will have been different to the one my parents grew up in. It evolves, and so do career paths; jobs exist now that we couldn’t have imagined fifty or sixty years ago. In another seventy years, on the cusp of the 22nd century, what career opportunities will exist then?

I’m in a slightly thoughtful mood of late; can you tell? New Year, new challenges, and all that. See you next week!