Chasing carrots

Its 9:30 already. The kids have been up for 2 hours. All I can remember doing is drinking coffee. What happened? Where did my morning go? Hold on. Where did my life go?

A lot of what I see down memory lane is carrots. One of the biggest carrots was dangled by my father when I was 15. He sat me in the kitchen and asked me whether I’d be going to work with him when I finished school. I hadn’t really thought much about the future but I knew that I didn’t want to work in his factory.

My dad’s carrot took the form of a proposition. He said that if I worked hard that he’d put me through college and university. He also made it very clear that if it didn’t work out then I’d be working in the factory quicker than you can say backache. Head down, pen in pocket, I chased the carrot for five years until graduation. Then I went to work in the factory.

The next carrot came in the form of a job opening over 3 thousand miles away. I chased it relentlessly. In no time at all, I found myself skipping the pond from England to North Carolina.

Countless carrots later I find myself here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have a wife, 2 kids and lots of stuff. I have a sports car, a six figure salary: a handful of carrots. It seems on the surface that there’s not many carrots left to chase… But that’s complete bollocks. There are so many carrots left to chase that it makes me dizzy thinking about them all.

What’s really troubling me this morning is the thought that any day now I’m going to wake up in a hospital bed, dying, wondering whether the carrots were worth it. I hope that I’ll look back at all of this and scream “Hell no!” Then I’ll take a stroll down memory lane, enlightened with the realization that the journey definitely was.