​I’m sure you all know the song I’m referring to.

Growing up, and from a very young age, this song used to make me cry.  I’d sit in my bedroom and cry, and still occasionally it comes to me when I’m running and I cry, because the eternal worry is you never have enough time to say what you really feel before your time here is done.  Partly because as a child you learn to be kind, and then as an adolescent to be spiteful, before being kind again as an adult – and then it might be too late.

Therefore, before I continue.  Thank you Mummy and Daddy, for everything.

Something I am very, very bad at is saying thank you.  Especially for gifts.  I take joy in being generous but being on the receiving end is not easy for me.  This is partly because I am not good at the unknown and any venture off piste is going to have to be registered before it can be accepted and feelings acclimatised.  So, and in some cases apologies for the immense delay, thank you.  Even if what I initially said was that it wasn’t what I would have chosen, please know I’ve grown to love and appreciate that a gift is in the giving and receiving.  And that I’m lucky to have the opportunity to say thank you.

A podcast I listen to asked the other day if any of us have a specific point in your life where you feel that you were at a momentous fork in the road, where you look back and wonder where it could have taken you.  For me there’s one such fork; exactly twelve months after September 11th I was working a summer internship at an electronic brokerage in New York, and at the end of the period they offered me a permanent job.  I turned it down because I wanted, really wanted, to continue my studies at Bristol University – and the rest is history as they say.

But what would be different if I’d stayed?  Subsequent to going back to Bristol I dropped maths and did a philosophy degree, yet bizarrely ended up working in investment banking regardless.  And working with electronic brokerages no less.  Would I still have ended up at the same desk back in London twelve years later?  Would I still have the same friends?  What would the experiences be which got me to this point if I’d said yes and embraced something a bit unexpected back then?  I am not someone who thinks it wise to just sit back and say that what will be will be, but it feels right to believe that there’s a place we’re each supposed to end up, and it’s the path we take which we make our own.

With that in mind, and the huge twists that I’ve experienced in the last three years, I’m interested to see what fate has in store for me.  And thankful for so much on my journey to date.

p.s. Yes, I know the song name, but the lyric made more sense for the post title.