THE REST
Otherwise known as Miscellaneous
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Must Try Harder
Thinking About the “Art’ of Retirement I’m a little more than 4 years into my early retirement at this stage. The early bit is relevant because somewhere in the back of my head I felt that retiring 5 years early meant I could take my time settling into my post-work world and have it sorted by the time I would have retired under normal circumstances at age 65. Needless to say, having it “sorted’ by any age I now know is a fallacy that only someone who was ploughing ahead with a fairly responsible job would think possible. Experience continues to be the great teacher, but experiential learning is time consuming and can be stressful. Precisely at a point in your life when time, measured in years, is shorter than ever, and stress is debilitating. Critical Inner…
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Thoughts, Decisions & Feelings
Earlier this week I needed to take a right turn up a country road that takes me home (queue the music). Keeping in mind we drive on the left here in currently sun kissed Ireland, that meant I had to cut across traffic. Normally that might involve avoiding a sporadic car driving too fast around the oncoming bends, but on this occasion there was relative gridlock because of a slow moving farm vehicle stacked high with something wrapped in plastic (I live in the country, I’m not a country boy – like John Denver for instance – even though he was in fact an army brat and not a farmer’s son). A very nice young woman decided not to continue in the funereal procession and stop to let me through. Commendable you might say and you’d…
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Neo:Sage
In my somewhat extended transition towards a better planned retirement, I have established a brief with two primary objectives. Firstly, I aim to preserve the strengths, knowledge, skills, and general wisdom accumulated over more than six decades of life experience and overcoming various challenges. Secondly, I intend to avoid adopting a nostalgic perspective that negatively compares the present and future with potentially idealized memories of the past. In effect this means combining the ability to keep up with current developments and cultural changes, while leveraging the benefits of experience. In that light I’ve decided to give this approach a title – NeoSage. It’s not new I’m sure but it makes it easier for me going forward to discuss my approach and evaluate its effectiveness without using lengthy explanations. There are two key elements to this approach –…
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Thoughts on Retirement
It’s NOT All About the Money Having surfed the internet for a long while now I can confirm most of the content produced in relation to retirement is about getting the finances right before you take the leap. That is an understandable perspective and is justified given the vagaries of the economy over the past couple of decades. I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy in many ways and like a lot of people of my generation I never got involved in stocks and shares or speculation of any kind. I saved when I could, paid my contributions to my work pension scheme, and kept my fingers crossed. I’m not recommending that as a strategy, but it was how I did it. At times in the years running up to my anticipated retirement I was so sure I…
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1,000 Followers Later
Imagine if that 1,000 followers referred to this lonely website! Well it doesn’t. It actually refers to my Instagram art account (link is in the right hand side panel). I reached this dizzying height on September 7th, much to my surprise. As I’ve discussed elsewhere (But Is It Art?), I never expected anyone to be remotely interested in what I produce and so I’m delighted and embarrassed in equal measure that people have spared the time in their busy lives to check out my stuff. Just in case you don’t have an Instagram account I thought I’d add a gallery here to show off my art posts from Instagram. Please remember these are examples of hobby art, self-taught and very subjective. Click on the thumbnail to see the whole image. I’d love to hear your views in…
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Memories….An Urban Myth
The prompt was – what was your earliest memory of being in danger? Well I can’t tell you that but I will tell you about the time I was nearly abducted by an urban myth instead. I lived for the first 3 years of my life in a local authority house on the northside of Dublin. The house was nothing special – what suburban terraced house is – but it was home and it was safe, or at least that’s what I thought. It appears though that it wasn’t as safe as I thought it was. As the story goes, shortly before we moved across the city to another end-of-terrace house in a very similar local authority estate, I was rescued by the quick thinking of our next door neighbour’s daughter. Apparently I was standing on the…
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The Artful Dodger
ENCOURAGEMENT Following a conversation late last year with Granddaughter #2 about her love of art and plans for the future, I was a little surprised at her reticence to show off her work online the way so many young people do, especially since she planned on a career involving art. She is reasonably confident in the art she produces and receives praise all the time from her family and teachers, so the reaction made little sense to me at the time. We talked about the need for her to build an art portfolio to secure her desired place in further education and eventually employment, but still she was shying away from showing off her work. So I said I would set up a social media account dedicated to showing the world my “art” if she would post…
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But Is It Art?
When I added an ‘Art’ category to this website I was being hugely optimistic and fully intended getting deeper into art. I’ve been making ‘art’ ever since I could hold a crayon in my pudgy hand, just like every other kid, but nobody ever thought of what I was making as art – not even my mother and face it mothers are the best promoters and general PR person a kid could possibly have. I can’t criticise them because I never considered what I did as art either, maybe something on the way to art or at least the beginnings of a journey that might see the production of art towards its end. On reflection we were all wrong. Okay I’m not claiming what I make is good art but, even based on the dictionary definition of…
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The God of Small Things
All my life I’ve had a problem finding value in the day-to-day actions of everyday life. It’s not that I craved constant drama or anything of that sort, in fact I tend to shy away from drama even when it’s a genuine crisis. I just never learned to worship at the altar of the God of small things. Maybe it’s repetition that causes me a problem, although I just spent hours over the past three days organising hundreds of music files by dragging them to new locations on a hard drive. Or possibly the lack of challenge involved in doing things that require little or no new learning. It could be the pointlessness of doing something, like cleaning or repairing, that will simply need to be done again and probably sooner rather than later. Honestly I don’t…
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MEANWHILE…#5
This is what I’m getting up to lately… Reading: Just finished “The Half Heroes” series by Ian W. Sainsbury. Loved it but couldn’t help feeling the third book was a little rushed at the end. Rereading Julian May’s “Saga of the Exiles” Series after 40 years. Finished book 1 The Many Coloured Land and most of the way through book 2 The Golden Torc. Every bit as good as I remembered it to be, despite some language and references that would cause a bit of a stink if it was published recently. The series is out of print and I had to buy the four novels from an online site selling second hand books. When the ban cheile saw the well thumbed books she was amazed I’d actually have books that battered. But the urge to read…
