Since June last year, I have placed my first step onto the Ceva Map. After a full month of dedication sandwiched by two interviews in within, the permanent job offer not only secures my stable income for now and nearby future but also grounded my floating spirit of life. I had been a fortunate girl loved by my family, in practical way, with financial abundance and for eternal deadline.
This full-time has taken over my life, nevertheless, which has never happened before. In the past, my loving subject, my generous friendship manner and my attention for the family take turns to locate in the core of my life. Even the PhD research, despite its demanding nature to build the forte and castle of thesis, never took over my life before.
This job, however, colours the range of time from 7am crossing over to 7pm (including the transit traffic). I recall the exhaustion physically everyday after work in the first few months. In exchange, the offshore drilling company starts laying faith in me and giving us more business than before. At the start, there were some small shipment and a massive manifest to truck the purchase orders to Amsterdam and long regular commercial invoice for the purchase order to the rig in Norway. Only four months later, Amsterdam Consolidated shipment had became the history, as the offshore account considers us competent enough to manage the freights to the rigs in Rio, Brazil.
During the transition, there ever increasing tasks and expanding job-load chains me to the desk from the minute I step into the office till the end of working hours. That is very not-me. To have a relax moment of me-time to surf on net, to update the news of the world, to savour the beauty of yum food have been pushed aside. The afternoon cake time with my girlfriends and the coffee date with my book in the slow afternoon have became a luxury.
Of course I miss the time when my life was supported by the family love emotionally, financially. But everyone has to grown up. It is tough at the beginning, maybe some tears, some reluctant struggles involved, but it is necessary.
If I know my parents and my brother will always love me the same way, giving me worry-free life style, no matter I was a student or a job-hunting doctorate, there would be the weak, soft, kind, naive and little-girl me for another few decades. Hiding under the beautiful and strong umbrella of love is a fortune for life, but I also would like to step out of the skirt of umbrella and grow arms to spread my own umbrella.
If ever I have the desire to provide my generous love to the others, to be shielded in a protected world is only framing the potential of expandable giving. Taking umbrella as an example, if I am always hiding under my family's umbrella from the raindrops and from the sharp sun, I would be only feeling sympathetic towards people who don't have this kind of family fortune yet unable to help them in the most practical way. On the other contrary, if I stepped out of my family's love, even though I might encounter storm, might be blown off by the wind, these adversities all strengthen my personality and my quality; one day, I would be able to foster myself to provide small umbrellas for the others. Or even more, my maturity and capacity might be able to assist the others to build their own little umbrella.
To think about this, if one day someone mocks about my decision of staying in Britain, refusing to go home, as a childish sign of rebelliousness, I will dispute fiercely against that comment. Only yourself knows what you really want. It is hard to fight on your own, especially the horror for me is to imagine one day my bank balance was in dangerous red: I can't just phone my parents to request for support when my saving ran down to £7. That reliant spoilt stage has far passed. This horrid feeling of being on my own encourages me everyday to drag myself to work, no matter how physically drained, how lazy emotionally I am at that stage.
It is all good. It is normal procedure to feel difficulty/challenged while you are on the right track of progress: the plaints seem so fragile, the grass pushes pass the soil in order to grow from the seeds through the ground. The egg shell seem tough, the little chick manages to break through from inside with the just grown fresh beak.
At Tuckchee's 60's birthday, there were many poet, writer, artists at the gathering to celebrate lives and joys. A doctorate candidate from Indonesia gave me a concept about career/job/occupation:
JOB is something that you don't mind doing, don't mind losing it: it is just something for you to feed your daily expense.
Occupation is something that you do mind if you lose it, and it does occupy your life because you care: you, however, would consider it if there is ever an alternative.
Career is something that you have passion about, something comes with your life - like nature, like mission.
How about me? to be a logistics coordinator would not be my dream job; to climb up the ladder in freight forwarder company has never been my direction before, especially considering how late I started this direction. Therefore, to take my life seriously, prospectively, I have to scale/ to communicate with myself/ to self discover what I really want has been growing critical now.
I have a dream, that is not to be astronaut, not to be a celebrity - that far reached. My dream is workable, possible, but takes a lot of dedicated effort and determination to approach. It is acceptable to do something else on the way while realising the dream is still kept true. Human cannot eliminate ourselves from the true reality. The most important key for me is to always have my eyes on the direction of dream, even though at times we have to sacrifice our time or part of our life to do something else on the way.
How any longer I will stay with Ceva, I have no idea. This has been providing me the bread to survive, the little treat for the restaurant visits, the little reliving f the good rich life that my family sponsored before. However, I also cannot deny the better choice is still to return to the university - that would be my next step.
