Reasons to be unreasonable

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, whereas “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

As i settle into this quiet month (hah!*) of reflection and future-scoping I am making sense of my reasons for leaving SCEPTrE as a way of thinking about what I want to be doing next. I think the great GBS, who has been my inspiration since I was in my early teens, has a very workable rationale. And it's worth noting that unreasonable women are nowadays having a hand in making progress, too, in the 21st century. Several (more than two!) of my (often male) colleagues and advisors suggested that I should comply with the bureaucratic structures in a low-energy way simply to free up enough time to do the important things! That was not good advice. Those compliance tasks can take up an awful lot of time - and life is short. I have never been too good with half-hearted working practices, and choose not to develop that particularly invidious competence.

Learning is not always reasonable. Nor should we necessarily expect it to be easy, comfortable or compliant.

* Who would believe how many things there are to be done in transition from one engaging job to another as yet undefined role!