My dad once told me I had to learn how to do things, and that thinking was not enough.
During a summer vacation from high school I was back in Mexico City. I remember going with him to Sanborns, a restaurant that is part of the eponymous department store chain. I was thinking about university and careers, so my dad had been asking questions like, “What do you want to do?” and “What will you study?“.
Now, both my parents were academics - my dad a professor and then an administrator, my mom an education researcher. The rest of my extended family was also in similar fields - journalists, researchers, writers, and the like.
The obvious path I wanted was in a similar vein; I was reading a lot of history and historical-fantasy, along with a fair interest in Enlightenment philosophy (during that period I was reading a lot of Locke, Hume, Rousseau and the like). So, what did I want to study? Well, I obviously wanted to study history and philosophy!
But, my dad told me, that’s not enough. You can’t just think about stuff, you have to do stuff. That conversation, I think, has shaped a lot of the decisions I’ve made in the 15 years since.
I still moved to Canada for university and eventually got a degree in Medieval European history. But I had to do, so my plan was to focus almost entirely in the humanities (aside from necessary STEM electives, all my course work was in history, English, and philosophy) so that I could progress onto a Master’s degree and then become a teacher. After all, I can teach, which is doing, but it’s to help others think!
The difficult part now was getting a job after graduation. I worried that I would not have enough money to enrol in a Master’s program and that if I didn’t get a job with a sufficiently high National Occupation Classification I would not be able to stay in Canada beyond the terms of my post-graduation work permit.
While completing my degree I had a bit of a scholarship and, in the vein of doing stuff, I started working on my private pilot’s license. Part of what really attracted me to it was the teaching - it was technical, it was performance-based, and it was one-on-one doing a very specific task. I figured that, with enough effort, I too could be a flight instructor.
So over the course of three years I finished my degree and also my commercial pilot training, and then moved on to becoming a flight instructor. Although the specifics of that and why I left are a story for a different occasion, I will say that I loved the job itself, despite the difficulties surrounding being an instructor.