One year ago yesterday I sat in the conservatory, isolating alone in that part of the house due to having COVID, and shut the lid of my corporate laptop for the final time. My last virtual meeting with other people had been earlier in the morning. At 5pm I was aimlessly deleting recurring appointments from my calendar, despite knowing my mailbox would be archived in full anyway. Just delaying the inevitable final logging off and what that lid closure signified. It was a strange and lonely end to a 39 year career.
Time to review what's happened since.
Let’s get the big question out of the way first - do I regret it?
In general I have no regrets but there are things I miss: having the daily rapport of a team; the mix of friendly banter and refreshing cynicism; a sense of achievement in resolving some complex issue, but not the stress during solving it; and the sense of being a part of something bigger than yourself. I definitely don’t miss long days, late night changes, audits and the minority who drank far too much of the corporate Kool-Aid.
It took a while to get over the impression that I was either on an extended holiday or the vague sense of guilt that I was ‘pulling a sickie’. Which reminds me, back in the 90s we used to get a bottle of cheap plonk for every year we went without a day off sick. The most I got was seven; always worth staggering into work half-dead for that cheap supermarket vino.
Just last week I thought to myself sadly, “August Bank Holiday, that’s the last one till Christmas”. Then I thought, what the hell do I care about bank holidays now, other than avoiding motorways!
Projects
I talked a lot about projects in the first posts on this blog. It was the most common advice I was given by other retirees - plan your projects in advance and don’t waste time before starting them. It’s good advice that I did follow, perhaps too much. I had so many projects lined up that finding time to do them all became the challenge. There are a lot of things we decided to do around the house and garden so we’ve ended up setting aside two days a week for personal projects. In other words, just like only having weekends to do enjoyable stuff!
My modified advice regarding projects would be this: by all means have a wide selection of them, but prioritise and don't start more than one to begin with. There's nothing worse than working on one piece and having the nagging sensation that something else is part-way through.
Unchain Your Brain
My primary personal project was to get back into art and drawing. If you read my last post, you’ll know I completed the year-long Draw Awesome course. You can see the output from that in the gallery. Beyond that, I wanted to create some artwork to my own taste and develop my own style. However that’s been a real challenge and I'm still working out how to change that.
As I said earlier, one of the things I miss is finding creative solutions to problems. Gardening, decorating and sorting out the loft aren’t without problems but not the sort that test the old grey matter too much. Use it or lose it, as they say, so I’d started using an app called Impulse that provides daily brain training games, puzzles and tests. One of these tests is supposedly for balance or dominance of the left or right hemisphere of the brain. According to this test, I’m 73% left brain dominant.
Problem is, there’s no scientific evidence that one half of the brain is particularly responsible for logic and the other for creativity. A study by the University of Utah using functional MRI to monitor brain activity effectively debunked that myth. The concept of the left/right brain being separate and different has been outdated for 30 years or more, so it's disappointing that the Impulse app still includes a test for it, with output claiming you can 're-balance' your brain (by subscribing to the app, naturally). Maybe it's because the left/right brain myth has re-surfaced thanks to a TED Talk and book from a stroke survivor, but there's still no evidence to back it up.
Essentially ‘left-brained’ is a figure of speech for people who tend to be logical, methodical, detail-focused and good at problem solving. Basically another way of describing personality. A couple of years ago I did a university course on the psychology of personality, and took various tests to understand how they work. They all had similar results, such as the Myers Briggs test (aka MBTI or ’16 Personalities’) which I’d completed in various forms before but always came out as INTJ.
INTJ personalities are rational, independent, analytical and love learning new things. On the other hand we have a tendency to be over-critical, unemotional, intellectually arrogant and socially clueless. There's a cartoon I saw once that sums this up: a visibly upset person shows the INTJ a note, the INTJ's only comment after reading it is, "you spelt 'suicide' wrong". The joke appeals to INTJs because we recognise that initial "I found a flaw" reaction, and hope - or worry - we'd have just enough emotional intelligence not to say it out loud in the same scenario.
"If a piece of work was an honest expression of its maker, it was also a milestone of his progress, and a benchmark to build upon in the future." Neil Peart, Travelling Music
Art means having the license to try different techniques and materials to see what happens. I can watch instructional art lessons and turn out stuff that looks a pretty good facsimile but as soon as I try to create something new, that internal art critic comes to the fore.
I’d set aside time to some drawing now. But here I am creating a blog post instead. And I know that half an hour from now, when my allotted time to draw is up, I’ll suddenly get a burst of enthusiasm to start, with the safety net of knowing there’s no time left, so I can't. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.
"What would I think of this if it wasn't me? That was always the question I tried to answer, though it was difficult, perhaps impossible to really see it that clearly." Neil Peart, Travelling Music
It wasn’t like that when I was younger. My school books are full of drawings of castles, knights in armour and battle maps to illustrate history homework. None of them were required, I just did them for the pleasure of doing so. I added some Egyptian gods drawings (influenced possibly by the classic Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars) for Religious Education homework and when it was marked, got the comment, “if you did these I’m very impressed”. I was really annoyed as to me they looked like they were done by a 12 year-old. What did he think - that I’d got an adult to draw them in the style of a child? Thinking about that now though, it’s a good example of my mindset. He thought they were better than I should have been able to draw at that age; I thought they weren’t as good as I visualised them. Overly critical even then.
"The keystone of any artistic construction is contained in that simple question, what is the intention? Not 'goal' or 'ambition', but intention. Still focused and directed, but gentle - forgiving and undemanding." Neil Peart, Travelling Music
The challenge I had for the past year was to stay the course with Draw Awesome. I’ve done that and the main things I’ve learnt are, (i) that I still have the basic ability and (ii) the basics of creating a finished piece from rough sketch to final detail. The next challenge is to overcome the limiting belief that we are either logical or creative and can't be both. The reality is that there are few careers that require both so we end up going one way or another. I dreamt of being an illustrator but ended up working in technology. The result is that we become far more practised and experienced in using the associated aspects of our personality; picking up the others is less familiar so feels much more difficult in comparison.
For me personally, reinforcing that it is a belief is the key to breaking it. No belief is based on fact, they're just choices we make and I intend to be creative as well as rational.
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