MY STORY
THIS IS WHERE I LET YOU SEE BEHIND THE CURTAIN AND YOU REALISE THERE ISN'T MUCH GOING ON BACK THERE AFTER ALL. IT'S ALSO WHERE I FEEL MOST UNCOMFORTABLE. SO NOW YOU KNOW.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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 –…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
My Signature: A Moviestar Moment
When I was promoted to what was to become my final role before retirement I had a momentary realisation that would make a small, but legally important, change in my life from that point on. I needed to change my signature. The role I was taking on, area manager for the local education and training board, would require me to sign multiple documents across a range of purposes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. The signature I had relied upon for the whole of my adult life up to that point was extremely legible and used a print based layout – letter by letter. It required me to lift the pen a number of times and more importantly was rarely used. I needed a signature that would be more difficult to copy and quick and…
-
THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DASHA & KLAUS
Paparali (www.paparali.com) wrote a couple of posts profiling her “fur babies” and so I thought why not do the same for my canine companions, Dasha & Klaus. Dasha & Klaus are littermates (two from a set of triplets) born on 11th November 2013 in Kells in Co Meath – where the famous Book of Kells comes from. They’re a cross between a chihuahua mother and a kaninchen dachshund father. Kaninchen dachshunds are the smallest variety of the breed and the word “kaninchen’ in German means “little rabbit’. They were an “accident” when one of the kaninchen dachshund dogs used for breeding took a secret shine to the breeders family pet chihuahua (or she took a shine to him!). We called the female Dasha because the woman who bred them was Russian and that was the most popular…
-
DUBLIN MADE ME…
Grey brick upon brick, Declamatory bronze On sombre pedestals – O’Connell, Grattan, Moore – And the brewery tugs and the swans On the balustraded stream And the bare bones of a fanlight Over a hungry door And the air soft on the cheek And porter running from the taps With a head of yellow cream And Nelson on his pillar Watching his world collapse. Dublin by Louis MacNeice I’m not really the sort of person who raves about his city or country. Largely because to a certain extent I believe where you’re born is pretty random when you think of all the decisions your parents made that led to the happenstance that dictated where your mother was when you were born. An example would be the fact that my parents planned to emigrate to the UK during…
-
UNSUNG HEROES
When my parents died we avoided the tradition of delivering a eulogy at the funerals, largely at their request. It simply isn’t part of our family culture to stand up and sing the praises of either the living or the dead. To be honest none of us ever seek attention and despite the fact I’ve spent more than 30 years working in education, many of them in front of class groups, I too was reluctant to expose my emotions on the day. Sadly The Ban Cheile’s* father died recently and it was the binary opposite of my parent’s send off. The comparison made me think about the purpose of eulogising a loved one when they die. Ironically one of the things that I’ve been critical about the catholic priest when he celebrates the funeral mass was the…
