Snowy paths and gray skies at Medborgarplatsen.
In reading my friend Bryn’s blog about her love of reading and thus her career choice (see Bryn’s site), I began thinking of how much my own career path has also been thanks to reading. (Bryn is a dear friend as well as a kindred spirit.) In fact, I would say that my love of reading put me on the path to living in Stockholm.
Like Bryn, I have been a lifelong reader. Childhood favorites the Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew got me to thinking beyond my home state of Ohio and left me wanting to explore beyond my own backyard. Two of my first great loves in high school were Ernest Hemingway followed quickly by Jane Austen. Hemingway made me want to be a foreign correspondent. Austen made me long to live on an estate in England.
This love of reading corresponded with a love of writing and I worked on my college newspaper and magazine. After graduating, I worked briefly in newspapers before switching to magazines. I love editing and writing for magazines, but that ever-developing urge to explore kept rearing its head. When I was not reading travel books I was taking some fantastic trips, hampered only by those short vacation days in the US. I married the Aussie husband, did more traveling and then we both decided we needed to live in Europe to do even more traveling.
Which all gets me to living in Stockholm. Robert and I have done many greats trips from here. I worked on an in-flight magazine for a few years and that was great because it allowed me to combine those loves of travel and writing. Now I am at work on writing my own travel book. It feels like the right thing to do. And it is all thanks to a lifelong love of words. As Bryn said: “I can’t NOT read or write.”
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It is helpful to take stock and reflect upon how you got to where you are and why. Building a life around your passions or incorporating your passions (no matter how big or small) in your life is what it’s all about…ENJOY!
Thanks KC. My career progression has been one steady path for the most part. But I think the long winter is making me philosophical!
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