Circle

 Last week, the third week with my new employer, I found myself standing in the main switchroom for a substantial part of a local district general hospital looking at the distribution schematic and associated switchboard. I recognised it as my own work from about 35 years ago. It was my first electrical distribution design. I was working for the regional health authority and amongst smaller projects was occupied with a major expansion of this district general hospital. As I contemplate the approach towards the later chapters of my career, working fewer hours and in possibly more supportive and steering rather than driving roles, there was a strange timelessness to looking at something substantial that I produced at the start of my career in the construction industry. I'd had a couple of years in other parts of the vast field that is electrical and electronic engineering but this was really the point where I 'took root' in my career direction. The combination of a recent  change in employment and this part of the past coming into the present had a feeling of circularity and I noticed my mind looking for meaning in it. Beyond any story it might construct there is.... what? I can't say. Maybe the strongest strand amongst a number that might want expression is this.... that we are so much more connected across everything and every time than we can ever really know. And that what seem like things are moments. Moments formed of connections. In Indra's net the diamonds sparkle. 35 years ago I couldn't have dreamt I'd write a sentence like that, yet if I think of the little boy who was fascinated with electricity and magnetism and who was somehow aware and sensitive to.... then it seems a natural unfolding. But such is the nature of autobiography. Everyday we write the story of the past and sow the seeds of the future.  I can't help but have a strange sense that it's all happening at once and that maybe, some no place and no time, all places and all times, all beyond the paradigm of our daily lives, where the diamonds which are only their own reflections turn in stillness, just in that moment as 'I' recognising 'my' own work from 35 years ago, the diamonds winked at each other. Or maybe not.