Changing Course

La Voz de Galicia – July 19, 2024 →

Cristina PatoI read an article this week by Pete Wells, one of the food critics for The New York Times, in which he explained his retirement from that same section, writing that at some point in recent months he realized he “wasn’t hungry” and stating “I am not my job.” I suppose it’s because I’ve spent the past four years thinking about what it means to retire from a job that, without realizing it, ends up defining you, turning you into something you perhaps didn’t want to be. But those words from Wells made me reflect on how we build our lives to, maybe, achieve some kind of stability, and how along the way, those feelings, those revelations appear, making us change course in order to survive.

There are people who find their life’s path in their profession, who feel their passion is their life and their work, and who coexist peacefully with that reality. There are also people who have to radically change their lives when the body stops “being hungry,” or when they remember that we are much more complex than that line that defines us publicly. And there are people who are simply present, who take their job for what it is, a means to build a life that has little to do with the job that facilitates it. And perhaps some of us go through these three ways of being in the world throughout our lives, feeling that we are several things at once, and that we do not have to be tied to what we said we were going to be.

Maybe dreaming of being something different from what we are is what makes us grow and learn, what makes us “hungry” to keep embracing life with the certainty that everything changes, and with the hope that at some point, it will change for the better.

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