What to do with my life?

I found myself questioning today. I was watching lecture-youtube videos on Mantel Hansen odds ratio and Cochran-somebody something test. What am I doing with my life? 

Clearly, I was not cut out for formulas and advanced math. I am grateful at least up until now I was not drown in it. Where did the genomics aspect go? Do I need to learn them all by myself? I found another kind lady’s youtube playlist Bioinformatics 101. I will stick to hers for a while, she does not have background music and her font is bigger. Today I noticed I could not read detailed labels on the ppt slideshow on the screen. Oh boy, I am getting old. Well the vials of retinol and vitamin C was telling me that as well. 

When I was a kid, I used to go to my dad’s printing office to help in the summers. This place was a 3 story production company with all sorts of printing machines. Yes we also had the one where you line up metal letters one by one in inverse order. My dad founded the company with a friend he met, when we moved to Antalya, only because they were both from Konya. Initially the company was in good condition and growing, even had a jingle in radio. Until one day, his co-founder just left and founded a new place. My dad himself was not a printer and he was mostly on the graphic design part. He has a natural talent for machines but not enough to make the whole business run. Especially when things got tougher every day. 

I remember working on the offset with my hands colored here and there. Adding paint to rollers, tiny blobs at a time and let it smear all over the roll. There were times I made mistakes and my dad would open his eyes wide. Not because he was scared of things, several times he gave me a ride in the back of his Kawasaki (or whatever sports motor) to dangerously speed up. I remember closing my eyes and screaming at my highest pitch. He liked taking risks, which also meant losing "a lot" in the stocks.

The most dangerous machine obviously was the "paper cutter". It is like a guillotine that has no mercy. It required you to press two buttons at the same time to make sure the papers are clear of hands. I remember other workers push a pencil into one of the buttons and then still try to use their hands to stabilize the stack of papers. Not sure how that happened, one day my dad also got part of his thumb chopped on the cutter as well. 

When the printing office was going down sharply, my dad had ideas to rescue it. He tried to make a facial tissue folding machine. -- He was good at making machines even though he did not even finish high school. Once he made a "roll-sticker" machine from scratch. That would print a bee image onto yellow circle stickers to be put on cherry tomatoes. -- This new machine would rotate a huge roll of facial tissue and then fold it and make perforations. Back then if you bought gas from a station they would give a free box of facial tissues to keep in your car, with the name of the gas station as an advertisement. 

The facial tissue folding machine proved to be a very difficult project. We all had to come in and help since there were no more employees left. My mom would put folded papers into boxes. The boxes themselves also needed hand folding and gluing. 

It is not hard to guess what happened next, we had to close the business. My dad also had a loong time to process what happened. He is a very smart person with an extraordinary brain. Just not cut out for running a business. 

I wonder if he had his episodes of thinking “what should I do with my life?”. He had 4 kids to feed, which -- at the end of the day -- forced him to push by working abroad in Dubai as a construction worker, working as an employee for another printing company, doing repairs, delivering packages etc until miraculously retiring later on. One thing he said many times when we went on walks together was “these days are the best days of our lives”. 

I notice big changes in federal work structure and employment opportunities. Many people might find themselves asking the same question: “What should I do with my life?”. This is an essential and painfully sharp question. I also notice more polarization and more hatred, among these news. 

Sometimes there is little control over how the river will flow. No matter how much we want to contain it, the bed shifts and it finds its peaceful new route. Rather than consuming my brain by questioning, maybe I should start observing. I could pull myself outside the situation up up up above like a bird. Observe how the river is flowing, the bright sparkles and bubbles it makes as it hits the rocks. Was that a fish that just jumped? An orange fish? 

I think I know what I should do with my life. “Enjoy it”. I should enjoy it deeply and acknowledge that there will not be a repeat of this very moment. Without knowing what the future holds, I should enjoy it thinking that these are the best days of my life.