By comparison, you are fortunate. You can reasonably expect to live into your late nineties. You are unlikely to have to fight in any wars, unless you choose to. You can expect to be healthy if you take care of yourself. You will be more broadly educated that I was and will have a more enriching home life. That is not to criticise my own parents, who had to bring me up in wartime, in an impoverished country with few facilities and no access to the modern marvels of the internet and television. You will be able to go where you want, do what you choose, live with whom you like, even decide what gender you want to be seen as. It is a world with much more freedom than I knew even if there are still some traces of prejudice to be seen.
Of course, the other side of freedom is insecurity. I will long remember my first visit to Moscow in 1961. Few people went there then. The only flight available was on Aeroflot from Copenhagen. As a private tourist I had to be escorted everywhere by an Intourist guide. Luckily she was an attractive young woman of my age. We got on well. At one stage she asked me, ‘Is it true that in your country you have to find your own work and your own place to live?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘we call it freedom.’ ‘I think that’s terrifying,’ she said.
She was right. To move from an organised society to one of individual freedom must be frightening.
In my day, Britain was semi-organised. There were traditional industries and large organisations that offered work and training to most of the population. You had to apply but jobs were not scarce.
Sons followed fathers down the mines or to the steelworks. Businesses offered lifetime careers. The armed services were eager employers as were the government services. I was spoilt for choice as were all of my age group, no matter what their level of education.
It was freedom with the promise of security.
That promise no longer exists. There is always work to be done and work to be found but more of it has to be organised by yourself. That is the new cost of freedom. I hope that some of the ideas in these letters may help. Trust yourself, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, be honest even if it costs you, remember the proverb that happiness (in Aristotle’s sense of happiness) is having something to work on, something to hope for and someone to love.
And now for some practical tips – or, more accurately, the things I wish that I had done, so please do them for me.
Learn a foreign language fluently. You can only do this by going to live and work in the country concerned. It does not matter which language, although Mandarin and Spanish would be the most useful. It helps, I am told, if you fall in love with a local, as long as he or she does not use you as their English teacher. I never learnt any language well enough to have prolonged conversation. I left it too late and I have always regretted it. Yes, everyone speaks English but you cannot know someone unless you can speak with them in their own tongue.
Learn to play a musical instrument while you are young. Music and mathematics are the two international languages. Anyone anywhere can read them without translation, and they are connected. I remember only too well my shame when my six-year-old son asked me for help with reading his piano score and I confessed that I could not. ‘What?’ he said, amazed. ‘Can’t you read, Daddy?’ To him, everyone could read music as well as letters. It has allowed him access to another world, one that I can appreciate but not understand.
Learn an individual sport while you are young. Team sports are great but they begin to peter out when you leave school or college unless you are a professional or talented amateur. The individual sports, however – tennis, golf, badminton, even croquet – last throughout life and can be a special way to combine activity and friendship. I learnt my tennis too late, got into bad habits and was never any good. I regret that now.
Write a diary. Marcus Aurelius, one of the great Roman emperors, who lived in the second century AD, kept a diary in which he recorded not his daily doings but what he learnt from them and how he prepared for the challenges ahead. He called it his Meditations. I strongly recommend that you read them sometime. More importantly, copy him. I long ago discovered that I had to write to find out what I thought. A weekly look back at what you have been doing and could have done better, or your thoughts on the point of it all, will greatly improve your ability to set the right priorities for your work and life. What worked for the emperor might work for you.
Fall in love. To find that you care for another more than for oneself is a marvellous experience. When you give of yourself for another you will find a deeper fulfilment than any more ordinary pleasure. You may do it several times. I did. You don’t have to marry the first or the second or even any at all, although, as I have written, I have found the bonds of marriage to be very strengthening. I am not talking sex here. Lust is not love, however appealing it may be at times. Please do not confuse the two, and never marry for lust.
Remember Aristotle’s virtues, particularly that of courage, to stand up for what you believe, no matter what. But remember, too, his golden mean, that too much courage can turn into arrogance.
These days employers look for character more than technical skills, believing that they can teach the latter but that character is there to begin with. Aristotle’s list is the best definition of character that I know.
And so farewell, to you and all those others who may read these letters.
May your lives be fulfilling, worthwhile and enjoyable, and at the end may you have no regrets for what you left undone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is one thing to write a book, but quite another to publish it. The subtle hints from my agent, Toby Mundy, first brought the idea to life, while the creative eye, careful management and painstaking attention to detail of Nigel Wilcockson, my editor at Penguin Random House, made it a book. I am hugely grateful to both of them and to all those who worked behind the scenes at my publishers to help them.
My wife, Elizabeth, died before it was finished but she had hugely encouraged me to write it. Her ideas and values permeate these letters. Her influence on my life and my thinking has been profound, something for which my gratitude is deep and enduring.
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Copyright © Charles Handy 2019
Jacket design by Stephanie Heathcote; Front photography © Shutterstock
Charles Handy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by Hutchinson in 2019
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473571600
21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Page 12
