I will get round to reading the book of The Danish Girl but last week I’d finished reading an autobiography, well sort of autobiography. The definition of an autobiography is an account of a person’s life written by that person. Late Fragments is by Kate Gross who in her twenties worked for two prime ministers and at 30 was the CEO of a charity working with fragile democracies in Africa (so says the blurb of the book.) A few years later she was diagnosed with colon cancer and passed away two years after that. So I'm pretty sure her account of life counts.
When I went on a book borrowing spree at Hitchin library, this was one of the books I came across and I recognised the story and realised I read about it in an article. She blogged while she had cancer and the book didn’t candy coat any of her feelings. She was an ambitious woman, but also her family was at the heart of everything. I like how she said that when people visited her they always wanted to talk about how she was feeling and then asked the reader; wouldn’t you get bored if you talk about yourself all day everyday. So she urged friends and family to tell her about their successes and what was going in their lives without any guilt.
It was a good read, and there was one part of the book that I want to share which was very insightful:
‘How I ended up spending my working life in this way is really a series of fortuitous accidents. As Steve Jobs said, the difficult thing about careers is that you can’t connect up the dots of your future in advance, only with the benefit of hindsight. My selection of dots – part choice, part chance, part a product of that mental landscape created in my early years – led me to a career in public service. But if I have learned anything in my working life, it’s that virtues and vices are not conferred on you by your job title. The dots that really matter aren’t the ones where you decide what you want to do, but how you want to be.’
That passage gave me a lot to think about.
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