The Impermanence of Things: Prioritising in Life & Career

During the summer I walked the Hadrian's Wall Path . Well, some of it. I started at Newcastle and stopped at Birdoswald, east of Carlisle, having been offered a lift home and needing to get back.

One of the points I had looked forward to on the walk was seeing the tree in the Sycamore Gap. I'd even had an old poster of it on my desk at home for months beforehand. As many of you will have seen, this tree has since sadly been cut down in what police called an act of vandalism (Sycamore Gap tree: The story so far - BBC News ).

Others have said it before me, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a more poignant symbol of how modern life can lead us to destroy things of beauty and importance. (Also, I recognise just how fortunate we are in this country to be mourning a tree when we remember the suffering of so many people around the world.) Few things last forever.

The run-up to Christmas and the start of a new year gives us time to pause and reflect. What do I want to be doing in 2024? What do I want to have achieved? (A great suggestion in a TED talk that was shared in my team recently – by Laura Vanderkam: How to gain control of your free time – was to write your holiday newsletter for next year now. In other words, write backwards to plan forwards.)

So, what is important in life? In a career? Is it just the money, the position, the power? Or is there something more to it?

Each of us will have our own values, I guess. For some the important thing is financial independence. The freedom they look for can be attained through earning enough to get away from whatever circumstances they are hoping to avoid (maybe).

Time is precious. Investing time in our key priorities should I think be a goal for 2024. That, along with contentment. The never-ending hamster wheel of chasing after the next thing is pretty tiring.

I enjoy singing. One of my favourite – if not my favourite – genres is early twentieth-century English song. Some of AE Housman’s poems from A Shropshire Lad were set to music by George Butterworth. I thought of it while writing this; it might be worth taking a moment to reflect on what we truly value in this life and, if we believe in such a thing, the one (or ones) to come, and where we might best devote our energies and the time allotted to us.

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Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

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Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

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And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

[Here’s a wonderful performance of the song by Roderick Williams at the BBC Proms in 2014: Butterworth: Six Songs from 'A Shropshire Lad' (Excerpt) .]

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Christmas is coming, and after that a new year. What are your priorities? How are you going to ensure that the things which matter in your life aren’t displaced by abandon and disregard? Where are we going to invest our time?

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Happy Christmas. See you on the other side! ??