Round the Bend
Sometimes we never see the bend in the road (particularly when it’s dark) until we’re on it. “Modern roads feature a convex transverse profile known as superelevation or a camber. This camber is designed to allow water to drain away from the road to its edges. Water is then carried away by gutters to drains placed at intervals.
Some roads don’t have gutters and water simply drains away to a naturally porous verge, or into ditches. Modern roads employ cambers in the bend of the road to help car stability by allowing them to ‘bank into’ the bend to some extent”.
A good mentor is like that camber. How you ask? Well, sometimes in a modern life we get so bogged under by all manner of accumulated “stuff” that talking through things with a mentor is a means of allowing us to do a little ‘stuff-letting.’ Getting it out of our system and or certainly allowing it to drain away.
Have you ever felt sometimes like your life is hurtling toward a bend in the road and you have no control of whether you’ll make it safely around the corner or not? If we continue with the camber analogy we do recognise that a particularly well designed road could infact allow our car to travel safely around the corner even though we feel we are not in full control.
It’s the same with a good mentor. They can keep us from going round the bend. They can head off a crash and burn scenario long before it’s even registered in our minds. I suppose that’s why I have three of them. All different life experiences, all from varying vocations and all offering a perspective independent of the other.
There’s method in my madness but mainly I’d be mad not to have them. I think everyone should have a least one person in their life that will tell them the truth in love. But what’s more important than even that, is to have one person who’ll be straight up with you and stick around to help you through applying it. Now that’s a real mentor. Mentoring is not everybody’s cup of tea and not everyone is cut out to be one in its truest sense, but if you can find one, you’re fortunate and even I don’t have to tell you that.
