When I was nineteen, I went to university.  I enjoyed it – I made friends, played sport, acted in plays – but I had no idea at all why I was there and I struggled to settle to my studies.  A year later, when I was twenty, I dropped out.

It was easily the biggest decision I had ever made for myself, the decision that would define the rest of my life.

Except it didn’t. I had only a vague idea what I would do next, so I worked at various jobs with varying degrees of success, from slight to vanishingly tiny.  I was an actor, a painter and decorator, a musician, a teacher of sorts, a dad and a house-husband until, many years later, to my great surprise, I went back to university.

This time I was sure I wanted to study, so I did. I read a lot, wrote my essays and revised for my exams. And, slowly and steadily, something gradually shifted, and now I am doing a job I love, as a teaching curator in a museum. Interestingly though, it’s clear to me that the really important choices that brought me here were not leaving university as a young man, or returning as a much older one, but all the smaller, everyday decisions that came in between: to do my work, to commit to whatever was the task at hand, and to do it as well as I could.

The writer of the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes knew the value of those small decisions. ‘Whatever your hand finds to do’, he wrote, ‘do it with all your might…Sow your seed in the morning and in the evening let not your hands be idle for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well’.  ‘Just get on with it’, he seems to be saying, and it’s good advice: in the end, the apparently momentous decisions might turn out to be the ones that seem the most insignificant – but unless we make them, we might find ourselves doing absolutely nothing at all.

When I was 20, I was an ass.