What A Year
These last few days, I’ve been contemplating resilience. I visited my physiotherapist yesterday, who commented on my remarkable recovery powers. He’s referring to coming back from my serious accident in April. Today, my iPhone shows me a memory from a year ago, when I walked up a steep incline and wore a weighted vest, a step in my recovery from my accident in May 2023.
In 11 months, I suffered 27 fractures, a damaged lung, a head injury, and a punctured artery. I visited the ICU twice—some year.
The situation was much more complicated than that. I stopped working full-time five months after my 2023 accident. I had worked for almost exactly fifty years without any breaks. Even though I know I should be enjoying my free time by playing a lot of golf and acting like someone in a Saga advertisement, it’s still a tough adjustment stepping away from working long, relentless 70-hour weeks.
The third factor – and not as superficial as it may seem – is that I also gave up the sport I loved after 50 years. While I would gladly be cycling today, it simply is not fair to my loving wife to risk putting her through the stress of another potential accident. The odds say I shouldn’t have another life-threatening collision with the tarmac, but that’s not a given. With the sport came a large part of my social life, too.
So to say it’s been some year is possibly understating matters.
The Mind Is A Powerful Thing
Starting with the positive and contemplating resilience. The human body is quite phenomenal. But the brain leads the way. I remember after my first accident, my ICU nurse telling me that one of my injuries is very often life-changing for people of my age. And he complimented me on my recovery. From my perspective, it was a case of my mind taking the lead. At one point, I knew that I was at a junction; one road led me to a dark place, and another led me to a positive place. The road was a challenging one, but I made a choice.
I didn’t feel sorry for myself once, and I didn’t feel negative once. I simply focused forward on getting better, and my mind led my body to that place. The human mind is a hugely powerful force, and when harnessed properly, good things happen. We know it can be harnessed for bad and evil, but that’s another story.
One interesting dimension was that after my recovery, I felt a better human being—calmer, more reflective, and more philosophical about life. That helped me enormously when my second challenge was stepping back from long working weeks and the stress and responsibility of a senior executive role. That should be easy, right?
Not So Fast, Sunshine
It turned out to be more challenging. And again, it found me contemplating resilience. One part of me loved the lifting of pressure, constantly being at the beck and call of digital devices, waking at 3 a.m. with the to-do list in my head flashing orange, the early starts, the late finishes, and the seven-day-a-week intrusion.
But work served another purpose for me, too. It was an outlet for creativity and the buzz of being in a sector I loved—and still love—to be in. It also gave a structure and drumbeat to my life. I started as a postman, eventually found my way into corporate life successfully, and then on into the world of startups and small, dynamic businesses. That structure and the chase for constant progress were reliable and, in many ways, were a part of my identity.
How often have you been asked, or been asked, “What do you do?” Work is a big part of our identity. Stopping work is not as easy as it sounds. Neither does it usher you into a featherbed of bliss and relaxation. Stopping work—you see, I don’t say “retirement”—is a challenge for many.
As perverse and whiney as it sounds, it has made me question my relevance and meaning.
So Is This All There Is?
It’s time for me to change my points of reference. Contemplating resilience but also considering new horizons. I’ve expressed the human mind can spur us all the extraordinary things. But that same mighty lump of grey matter can change in other ways. It’s how you use your mind.
In many ways, we are products of our past. Our character, hopes, fears, philosophy, ambition, and many other dimensions are informed by our past. But those attributes can become murky quicksand that narrows horizons and suffocates ideas, creativity, and ambition.
The same resilience, drive and bloody-mindedness that got me to this point hasn’t evaporated. Can I now channel my time into other rewarding areas? I have no ambition to sit on my arse for the next twenty years. Saga Cruises will never see a cent of my money, and neither will the local golf club.
What Got Me Here Won’t Get Me There
Some management consultant said that. I met a leadership coach called Marshall Goldsmith who entitled one of his books ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There’ but I find it tough to believe that someone didn’t coin the neat phrase before him.
It applies to my situation. It doesn’t mean I throw the attributes that served me well into the trash. Contemplating my resilience, I know that basket of qualities has to stay with me. My lifelong thirst for change and trying new things will come in handy.
The biggest challenge is dropping fifty years of routines. The world doesn’t need me to start another business, that is for sure, even if I had the appetite. I start to list things I would like to do and I’ve seen some people raise an eyebrow.
For example, I would like to write a novel. People expect me to write a book on business. But I loved writing as a kid. Why do we tend to write off things we enjoyed or showed an aptitude for when we were children? The growing into adulthood system we have looks to kill off a lot of spontaneity, and creativity, and curiosity we have. We have rules passed down to us. Some behaviours and thought patterns are openly mocked. We gradually conform to the adult template that was taught to us.
It Never Ends
The template for being old is also well worn: Slow down, smell the flowers, all that stuff. What isn’t verbally articulated are the negative elements: being less useful, seen as irrelevant or having nothing more to offer. This presents itself in many forms, the most infuriating being ignored.
It’s an annoyingly Western habit. I take that as somewhat of a saving grace for the world. I’ve seen on my travels to places as disparate as Morocco and Japan that elders can be treated respectfully and seen as wise. Our social media, soundbite-driven, low attention span Western culture can result in ageing being seen as something negative. I found this TED article on differing attitudes to the elderly – and yes, I’m officially elderly – fascinating.
I’m starting another journey. I’ll contemplate resilience, as I know it’s one of my big strengths. I’ll try and refind the child in me. Grieving for the structure and safety of work is wasted time. And of course, time is my most scarce resource.
Most importantly, I can’t mope and pine for past perceived glories and comfortable routines and habits. As often as not, routines and stability are not all they are cracked up to be. And they can seriously constrain imagination, ambition, and the very act of living. It’s time to crack on.