I mentioned a few months ago how I started a new job. It’s taken a while to settle in but I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it now.

One of the aspects that has been a bit challenging about this new job is that it is in a sector I’ve never worked in before. Don’t want to say too much (I prefer to keep professional stuff away from this site for a number of reasons) but I can summarise by saying it’s in a medical-related area.

Not that the medical thing is completely new to me. I have previously worked in a faculty within a large medical school, but there the focus was more on the science (biochemistry to be exact) rather than the clinical aspects. But in this job, I’m exposed much more directly to the day-to-day elements of life on the healthcare frontline.

To say that some aspects have been a bit confronting would be a big understatement, particularly for someone as squeamish as I am. The one thing that really hits me as I delve deeper into the subject matter is just how complicated our bodies are, and how many different ways they can go wrong. There’s lungs and hearts and livers and kidneys and brains, and each of these seems to have a million and one potential malfunctions. Sometimes, I begin to think it’s a wonder the whole thing works as much as it does.

And then, because I never can help it, I put my writing hat on. I start to see the resemblance between a story and our bodies. Just like the flesh and blood that keeps us alive, there are plenty of ways a story can go wrong. We can mess up the plot, We can mess up the characters. Even when we’ve totally planned out how everything should function, we can still screw it up in the execution. And no matter how right we feel that we’ve got it, there are always going to be plenty of readers more than happy to tell us that we actually stuffed it up.

But does that stop us doing it. No sir! No matter how much I stuff it up, I’m going to keep pushing my stories out, hoping to get them as right as I possibly can, at least for me. And isn’t that a bit of a metaphor for life? We all know that at some point, our bodies are going to let us down. None of us is going to live forever. But that doesn’t stop us. We still aim to have the best life that we possibly can, making the most of it until the inevitable occurs.

Until then, make sure you have a good one. Look after your body, and hopefully it will look after you.