|
|
|
|
|
|
Robert Twigger has written six books including the award-winning Angry White Pyjamas. He won the Newdigate poetry prize whilst at Oxford and his documentary film Big Snake, made with National Geographic has been shown in over twenty countries. He is currently in the middle of an expedition following Alexander Mackenzie’s route across Canada using a traditional birch bark canoe. In his words, something about the subject of his talk ‘Lifeshifting’: “First there was ‘upshifting’ – it was called a career! Then there was ‘downshifting’ – otherwise known as dropping out! Then there was ‘lifeshifting’ – changing course, often radically, to find the right life for you. That’s the hype. Actually, ‘lifeshifting’ as an idea is hardly new. It simply refers to people taking the thing they do with most of their time more seriously than money, status or tradition. The idea came to me whilst writing an article for Esquire magazine about people who had started life with one career and then changed to something completely different – I interviewed an artist who had been a ‘pro’ footballer, a dive instructor who had been a physiotherapist, a former secretary who became a ‘horse whisperer’ and an underground rail worker who had once been a lawyer. I had my ‘lifeshifts’ too – from high school teacher in Japan to full-time martial arts student to writer. All along I kept running into the same question: why didn’t I do this earlier?” In his talk, Robert Twigger wants to look at why it’s so hard to change our lives until the moment when we do, when the sentiment usually is: what was I so frightened about? In an age when the standard career pattern is threatened by impersonal corporate ideals ‘lifeshifting’ offers a way to find your way back to feeling more in control of what you do. |
|
