For most, the balance of the work mix will change as they move through life, with paid work diminishing as they get older but not necessarily disappearing. A farmer in his seventies, when asked what his life was like, replied, ‘The same only slower.’ Many would like to be able to say the same, doing what they know how to do, but only on two days a week, not five – just enough to add to their income but with time left over for their other interests. If that is their wish the world of work is moving their way.
Organisations are endlessly rearranging themselves, disgorging ever more chunks of their work, pushing many outside and hiring them back as part-timers or independents. It often makes the place more difficult to manage but they do it to increase their flexibility, and also, if the truth be told, to escape some of the obligations that legislation imposes on them. Ironically, some measures that are designed to protect the interests of the worker, for example by making it more difficult to dismiss someone, can end up deterring employers from hiring them in the first place. Already one quarter of the workforce is part-time and another quarter are self-employed or in tiny one- to four-person businesses, most of them working that way from choice but others because they have to, particularly as they age.
It is all good practice for the final quarter of life when almost all of us will find ourselves responsible for our own lives with no help from any organisation. By then we will have traded what was left of our security inside an organisation for the freedom outside. It is not a bad exchange, as many have found, provided we have a skill and know how to market it, price it and maintain it. There lies the rub. With self-initiative discouraged by our organisations we are bereft when we leave them. What we need is what independent professionals have always had: agents – people who are paid to find customers for us. It is a role that trades unions could play but choose not to. It is something that employment agencies claim to be doing but could do better. It is a role that voluntary bodies could usefully take on. Too many languish, their skills and talents unnoticed.
Unnoticed even by themselves, sometimes. One advertising executive, made redundant in his late forties, found his way to an outplacement consultant.
‘What can you do?’ he was asked.
‘Advertising,’ he replied.
‘Yes, but what else, since that career has reached its likely end?’
‘I can’t imagine anything else I could do or be.’
‘Why don’t you ask a dozen people who know you well’, the consultant said, ‘to each list one thing you are good at and come back with the list?’
On his return he confessed that he had been amazed at the list of qualities they saw in him. ‘But it’s odd,’ he said, ‘none of them mentioned advertising.’
Our past can blind us to our future.
In the new fast-changing world potential counts for more than past experience and the ability to learn more than qualifications. That is as true in the last quarter of life as it is in the first three. Laurels are no longer for resting on. A government’s first duty is to advise us, truthfully, of what lies ahead, not to make false promises of a risk-free future. Our duty, and yours, is to prepare for that fourth quarter of your life. With proper forethought for the practical details of money and health it can be a time when you are free to be fully yourself, living the kind of life you once dreamed of, full of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s recipe for success and the good life that I outlined in my third letter. There will still be time at the end of life to be the person you knew you could be if only circumstances allowed. Well, now they do. That has to be the great boon of our longer lives. I never expected that my later years would be my most enjoyable years, but so it has proved.
There is, however, one essential precondition for a good fourth quarter: your health. You won’t enjoy any of those later years if you can’t get about and look after yourself. Of course, stuff happens in life that we can’t foresee: illness, accidents, unsuspected genetic problems, failing eyesight, dementia perhaps. Old age isn’t always nice. But good health in old age starts early. A healthy middle age will make a healthy older age more likely. Obvious, but easy to forget when life is at its busiest. The sad truth is, however, that many will still be too ill, too poor, too unskilled or too depressed to make the best use of these bonus years. This will be a growing challenge for the social services and the NHS. The best contribution that you can make is to do your best to ensure that you will not be in need of their help.
LETTER 20
YOU ARE UNIQUE
The neurologist oliver sacks once said, ‘There is no one like anyone else, ever’. You are unique.
Indeed, but who are you? Do you know? How will you know?
I have left these questions to later in my list because they are, in some way, the most searching and the most difficult to answer. The ‘white stone’ is my answer, but it, as you will discover at the very end of this letter, is only a sort of answer.
One day, several years ago, I was helping my wife put on a show of her photographic works in a small country gallery. It seemed to go well. I was no longer needed. She was showing people around while I was idling in the background.
A man came up to me: ‘Lovely photographs, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Yes, they are,’ I agreed.
Then he said, ‘Do you know if Charles Handy is here as well as his wife?’ ‘Yes, he is,’ I replied, trying to look modest and unassuming, ‘and I am he.’ He looked me up and down for a long moment, frowning, clearly puzzled. Then, ‘Are you sure?’ he said.
It was, I told him, a good question, one that I had been asking myself a lot recently. You see, there had been several versions of Charles Handy as I passed through life. I had started out as an oil executive in South East Asia. Did he know me from those days? In which case he would have found me much altered, and, I hope, much more interesting. Or had he listened to my radio broadcasts on Thought for the Day on Radio 4? I had done these at regular intervals for twenty years. He would not have seen what I looked like but he might have an image in mind from my voice or from the religious nature of that radio slot. So perhaps I now looked far too sleek and secular to be the priestly man he had imagined. Or had he been one of my students forty years before and time had played havoc with the features he remembered?
How or where he remembered me is unimportant. The problem for him, and for me, was that I had changed over time. As we all do. Life changes us; then, hopefully, we change our life to suit us. A further complication is that we can appear to be different people in our different roles. Are you the same person at work that you are at home? How do we know which is the real you?
My wife, the portrait photographer, liked to capture images of her subjects in the three most important roles in their lives. She believed that we each had at least three different selves. She would ask her sitters to act out those selves, dressing the part. She would photograph the three selves separately but in the same space, then put them together so that it looked as if the three selves were talking to each other.
Her own three selves were photographer, family manager, business agent (for me). She was a slightly different person in each. As a photographer she was passionate, focused and brooked no interruption. As the head of the family she was warm, witty and funny, a much-loved granny and a great cook and hostess. Finally as my business manager she was fierce and demanding, wanting nothing but the best for me. She was known as the dragon. So who was she? Obviously a combination of the three but the one that was in the ascendant depended on which stage of life she was in. She would have loved to focus all her time on her photographer self, but family and, later, business matters required her to give time to her other selves.
You too will eventually have three selves of work, passion and home life, three different versions of yourself. They will all be you. The important thing is to recognise that some matter more than others at each stage of life. You can and should experiment in your youth, but as your responsibilities grow you may need to pay more attention to your job or the work you d
o. It is tempting to think that life can revolve around your enthusiasm or passion, that there can be nothing better than being paid to do what you love. I warn you, however, that if you turn your passion into a business it may become a chore not a pleasure. Had my wife set out to make money from her photography she would have ended up taking wedding photos or endless studies of babies, not what she wanted at all.
I remember meeting a young woman at a party. She wrote plays for television, she told me. I was impressed. ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘They never get produced.’ ‘So how do you make a living?’ I asked, a bit impertinently. ‘I pack eggs on Sundays. No one in their right minds would do it, but it pays well enough and leaves me free in the week.’
It became a byword in our family. If any of us was doing work just for the money we called it ‘packing eggs on Sunday’ – what you do to keep the bills paid and leave you free to do what you really love. It is very rare to get passion, money and time for home in one package, and even then the money tends to crowd out the others. You can be three selves in one, the personal trinity.
Is there, however, a constant core to the three selves, something that is common to all three that is the true you? We would all like to think that there is, that we don’t change our priorities when we change our roles or switch between different selves, but that core self can be hard to pin down.
My wife, creative as always, used her photographic skills to help people work out what was key to their life and what was more incidental. I have mentioned in another letter that she would ask people to choose five objects and a flower to represent their life. She would then ask them to arrange them on a table so that she could photograph them.
The result was what she called a modern still life, like the old Dutch vanitas portraits. Those were visual sermons that celebrated a person’s wealth but always included a skull or dead leaves or other objects as a reminder that the riches and foibles of the world were all vanities and that death comes to us all in the end. Her portraits were not so morbid in their intention but they did encourage people to work out what was critical to their lives, as they pondered what to put in the centre of their personal picture. You might like to try it.
My own still life had images of my books that were my work, of food and wine and Italy, things that I loved; there was a camera lens to represent my wife and her crucial role in focusing my life, but in the centre was a little yellow gum tree sculpture that looked like two teardrops. The sculpture had been commissioned and given to me by my children, on my seventieth birthday. The teardrops, they told me, were not tears but golden seeds. I had, they said, helped them to find their own golden seeds. The sculpture, therefore, stood for my children and family but also for my deepest belief in the principle of the golden seed that I discussed earlier, the idea that everyone – yes, everyone – is special in some way, that there is in all of us a seed of potential. It is my hope for the human race and the heart of my philosophy of life. Put all those symbolic objects together and you have as good a definition of what my life is about as you could get.
That, however, came later in life. It had taken me a long time to discover who I really was. I started at the other end, by crossing out the things that weren’t me. I’m ashamed to say that I spent the first ten years of my working life trying to be someone I wasn’t – a business manager, for instance. I did not hate the work but I soon knew that I was not going to be any good at it and that I was not particularly interested in it. Nevertheless, no experience in life is ever wasted and when I later started to teach other would-be executives I found that my experience came in useful. As you set off on your life’s journey I would urge you to try anything that looks interesting. You will soon find out whether it suits you or not. Even if it proves to be a dead end, or a failure, don’t worry. You will learn more from your mistakes than from your successes, as I discovered during my early years at work.
What that meant in practice for me was the need to work out what was important in my life and to distinguish that from what was necessary. The two are different. If you concentrate on what you have to do you may miss out on what you ought to do. I remember, twenty years ago, hearing an Italian journalist being interviewed on BBC radio. The Italian parliament had collapsed, once again, so the BBC interviewer said, ‘It is very serious for your country now, is it not?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Italian, ‘it is very serious, but it is not important.’ One reason that I love Italy is that they know instinctively what is serious and what is important. It makes governing the country tricky but living in it a delight.
Life is a journey of discovery, I soon found out, a discovery of oneself.
You cannot discover anything, however, if you keep to the old safe and familiar track. You have to explore to discover. Journeys typically have a destination, but explorers have only a hazy notion of what they will discover or where they will end up. Life is like that. I once planted two rows of chestnut trees at the bottom of a field to shield us from traffic noise. A friend, visiting us, commented that it was an avenue of sorts, ‘It’s an avenue going nowhere,’ he added, ‘rather like life.’ He was, I think, reflecting, half seriously, on his own life, but it could be true of many. Do any of us really know where we are trying to get to in that journey of our life? Or do we only know it when we get there? Perhaps that is what the saying ‘death gives meaning to life’ is suggesting.
One way of thinking about the destination is to imagine the short eulogy that your best friend might deliver at your funeral, supposing that you lived to a ripe old age. It is a eulogy so no one will speak ill of the dead, and he, or she, is a good friend. The eulogy, therefore, is positive, perhaps with the odd affectionate joke thrown in. What might it say? I have listened to many of these and yes, they do touch on the highlights of long-past achievements, but these were over and done with long ago. Most of the eulogy, therefore, has been about the kind of person he or she was, how they will be remembered, what they leave behind them. It is a slightly bizarre exercise to do when you have only just started out in life, but it does offer another way of thinking about that final destination for the journey.
I keep a white stone on my desk to remind me of a strange verse in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. ‘To the one who prevails, the angel said, I will give a white stone on which there will be a name written, a name known only to the one who receives it.’
I don’t know what the correct meaning of that verse is but I interpret it to mean that if I succeed in life I will earn a new name that is created especially for me. In other words I will finally be my own person, not just the inheritor of another’s name, someone else’s genes. It means that if I have made my own mark in some way, lived up to my full potential, made my own life worthwhile, only then do I deserve my white stone. Only you will know if you have earned your white stone. It is personal and private to you. It cannot be defined or marked by honours or public acclaim but you will know it when you get it. I hope you do.
LETTER 21
MY LAST WORDS
Like the Poet Keats I have long been ‘half in love with easeful death … to cease upon the midnight with no pain’. But I would also beg a few days when, weak but still coherent, I might have a few hours with my close friends and then, lastly, with you, each of you, my own much-loved grandchildren, one at a time. I would treasure this chance to say goodbye to you.
I feel very privileged to have had the chance to know you. I knew only one of my own grandparents and she died before I was old enough to talk with her. I have been fascinated to watch you grow up and see how you take on the world. You are my legacy, my final gift to the world and I am so proud of you, of all that you have achieved so far in your short lives and of all that you might achieve. I loved the confidence with which you spoke at your grandmother’s funeral and celebration. I can see that some of the performance skills of my family have passed down the line. But more importantly I can sense that you already know kindness and thoughtfulness win friends and gain respect. I know that you wil
l do me proud. My only regret is that I will not see you in full flower when you grow up.
It will not be a sad occasion, our meeting. I have had a long and wonderful life, but all things, even good ones, come to an end and I am tired now. Life has been a bit one-legged since your grandmother died and trying to walk alone has been painful. Death I see as one long sleep from which you never wake. I would love to think that in that sleep I might meet your grandmother again in some way but I know it is just wistful dreaming. As it is I talk to her in my head every day and she to me. Death is just the end of a story and, as you know, a story without an end does not work.
When we meet, therefore, I would like to ask you about your hopes for your own story, how you see yourself in ten years’ time, doing what and living where, with whom perhaps. I like to think that you and your generation will undo some of the mess that my generation and the one after have left behind. I dare to believe that your values will be better than ours were, that you will be less selfish, less heedless of those less fortunate than you, more aware of the environment and the need to protect it, that you will be kinder than we were and more tolerant of those who live differently.
In our defence we lived in a different time. We came of age soon after the last war ended. We felt sure that, like the previous generations, we would be at war again within twenty years, only with new enemies and with new and worse weapons. Two of my classmates had already died in the Korean War of the 1950s and every man had done two years in the armed services as their National Service. The spirit of war was all around us. I felt it was almost inevitable that I would be dead by the time I was thirty. No wonder, looking back, that we were selfish and short-sighted, eager to pluck what we could out of life before it ended. After twenty years, in the late sixties, life began again, hope blossomed and nations competed to get to the moon not to war. But by then I was a married man with two children and a wife to support.
21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Page 11
