How I Changed Careers in My 50s and Started Searching for What I 'Want to Do' and What I 'Love' — Realizing That Life Itself Was a Design

4. Things I Had Left Behind
— Looking Back on That Day

Welfare work.

I had vaguely thought while raising my children that I wanted to do it once I became a middle-aged woman and my child-rearing duties had settled down.

Seeing overseas celebrities and ladies of leisure engaging in such activities made me think,
that's nice.

Well, that was impossible, though.

At the very least, as an employee.

When my children entered junior high school, I went to school for two years.

At the time, the news on TV was making a fuss about how nursing care was 'a job that involves cleaning up after people.'

It was treated as something like a heresy.

Is that really the case?

I was curious if I would be scared when asked to change a diaper, and since welfare-related work was an unknown world to me, I wanted to know about it.

After all, being born as a human, excreting is a normal thing, right?

So, we rely on toilets every day. And sewage systems, too.

Can we really just say 'ew, gross' and exclude that?

It has a proper role.

Therefore, there must be people who do that kind of work.

Is it okay to discriminate against that? I wondered.

Thinking about such things, I completed 450 hours of practical training.

And, after finishing the training, there was something I understood.

I am no match for the users.

I was in my 40s at the time.

Elderly people who have lived twice as long as me, or even more.

I am no match for them.

Not in the weight of their words, nor in the paths they have walked.

Nor in the various losses they carry.

Health, youth, work, a spouse, children who have left the nest, friends, money, a place to belong, and the time they have left...

Comparing myself, complaining about trivial things, to people living while carrying all of that.

It felt as if we were on different levels as human beings.

One woman, you see,

had six children.

Her husband went off to war and never came back.

She even had a nursing infant.

She strapped the baby to her back, worked in the fields from morning till night, never remarried, and raised all six of them on her own.

Another woman, you see,

had an arranged marriage.

I wonder if her parents decided it for her.

Maybe it was what they called a betrothal.

Her husband was a tyrant and an alcoholic.

In the end, he would bring his mistress home and say,

'Serve us dinner.'

“Boil the bathwater.”

He even made her take care of that woman.

It’s humiliating, isn’t it?

Even so, she thought it would be a burden to get a divorce and return to her parents' home.

She endured it.

She endured it until her husband passed away.

And even now, she lives carrying that suffering with her.

One man, you see,

showed me his back.

From around his right shoulder blade to near his left flank.

There was a large, diagonal scar, slashed across it.

“I was shot by a gun during the war. This is from after the surgery to remove the bullet.”

That is what he told me.

He didn't condemn the war.

He didn't tell a tale of heroism either.

He simply stated the fact.

One man,

used to be a school principal.

At one point, he appeared in a news article.

A woman who saw it sent a postcard to the newspaper company.

“I met him once.”

That was it.

The man, who had reached the age of 100, lived his life keeping that postcard tucked away carefully in his left pocket.

He had a wife, too.

He had children, too.

He had a life he had cherished.

Even so, he kept that one postcard close.

I just couldn't compete with that.

Even now, when I think about it, I tear up.

I want to catch up to those people, too.

Someday, perhaps.

I want to become someone who can help others.

That's what I thought.

But you know.

In reality, it might be that I'm the one being saved more often than not.

What I gained from that internship.

It's like an irreplaceable bible for my life.

……And yet.

And, oh right.

I'm leaving this behind, I realized.

Even though I received something so important that day.

I left that behind and walked a different path.

What are you going to do?

That's what I asked.