What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
When I was younger I was often asked questions that irritated me. Why did I do something? Why didn’t I do something? Wouldn’t it be easier if I did X? Wouldn’t it be easier if I didn’t do X? When you are younger, those questions and the ones about marriage, number of children, amount you were earning all seemed like a personal attack, whoever was asking it. I always felt defensive and occasionally angry depending upon who was asking me the question. I suppose it was years of bullying at school but I always assumed that any questions were for the worst reasons and to somehow trip me up. I gave off an angry young man vibe well after I was young!!
Fast forward to my current situation and no one is really that bothered about me or asking me questions beyond the most basic, ‘How are you?’ and that is absolutely fine with me! As you get older you get more and more invisible to the world. Some people bemoan the fact but I welcome it because you can walk along in the margins of life left to your own devices. No one outside your close circle is interested in your marriage, family or career so you don’t have to answer to anyone who doesn’t matter. Janet will ask me questions about various things but I know her questions come from a place of love so that’s fine. When people you don’t know very well are asking you those questions they seldom are.
So, look forward to your declining years, as they used to be called, as irritating questions from irrelevant people become a thing of the past!
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
To be honest I can’t think of anything I have done in my life that hasn’t failed at some point, and all but the most fortunate of people will say the same. What I don’t think happens is what is suggested by this prompt. One failure doesn’t lead to future success. That only happens because you are forced into a change of course. 90% of the time that change of course will lead to more problems or to you making no progress. In a sense, this ties in with the prompt the other day about fate. If we ‘notice’ a failure leading to a success we are pretty much guaranteed to be imposing a structure on our decisions in retrospect which definitely wasn’t there at the time. We say to ourselves that we reacted to A, put B in place and it turned failure into success. Actually what happened 90% of the time is that we took another punt and this one worked out. This is why I am incredibly suspicious of the ‘role models’ with their 10 steps to success. All they do, to my mind, is retrospectively impose a narrative on a series of unconnected decisions. The sooner you realise that you are only in control of about 10% of what happens to you in life, the easier life will be for you.
Yes, take a chance on things but if they succeed remember that you got lucky and that if you had made the same decision a month earlier or a month later it would probably be added to the long list of your failures.
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
Chapter 1
If you are wondering what a typical year in my life looks like, well so am I!
As you may have gathered from any of my posts from the past few years, I don’t do typical in terms of my journey through life. There are very few things that have followed a ‘traditional’ path, a pattern that has become more pronounced over the years, but to be honest I am glad of that. I didn’t do the jobs I was expecting to, or indeed expected to, I didn’t go to Polytechnic until after most of my school contemporaries had already left higher education. I worked abroad before it was a particularly common thing to do. We had a bigger family than was expected and shared the caring duties with whoever got the first or most lucrative employment going out to work and the other staying at home to look after the children. I was a house husband for a total of about 5 years. In everything I have done I have appalled, irritated or baffled most people I know!
Final Sentence
With everything I know now, with all the ups and downs, I would not change a single thing!
What are three objects you couldn’t live without?
When I was at St Andrew’s school I regularly came home to an empty house with one parent working 9 to 5 and the other doing shifts. I was what was called a ‘latch key kid’. My biggest problem was that I often forgot the key to go into the latch! Often, my Mum would come home to find me in the garden or sheltering from the rain at the back. You would have thought that I would have learnt after a couple of times, but no. I was still occasionally forgetting my key into my teens. A lack of organisation was the root cause, exacerbated at Secondary school by very high levels of dread and fear at the prospect of going to school. Nowadays I still need to let myself in on a regular basis and I have a place for my key so I don’t forget it.
That key is next to my wallet so I don’t forget that either. I now have a card wallet that seldom contains actual money, and I miss that. When you spent over 40 years of your life using notes and coins, that still seems like the default setting for daily life. When I was younger I had notes and coins and always kept them in the pockets of my trousers and my coat. That would often cause me to get to a shop, decide to buy something and then search through 6 or more pockets to see where I had left my money the night before! Sometimes I didn’t have the money, as it was in the pockets of the previous day’s trousers. As with keys, it took me an inordinate amount of time to settle on a particular pocket for my money, and even now, I can still be caught out when I leave my wallet in a coat, a pair of trousers or in the wrong place in the house.
These days my third and final item is my phone to contact people and count my steps in the main. I wondered what the equivalent was in my childhood and I decided that there simply wasn’t one. Perhaps I would have change for the telephone box or I might have a calculator if I was off to school. A notebook and pen were a must if I thought I might need to take notes about something. A torch would be in my pocket on scout camp. A phone has replaced all of them.
As I was never a smoker I never had the concealed packets of cigarettes and box of matches some of my friends had. During the Autumn and Spring terms I would have gloves because I have always run on a different thermostat setting to everyone else! Finally, I would put all the rubbish from sweets, sticker packets and crisp packets etc in my pockets to dispose of when I got home. The problem was that I often forgot to do that and ended up with coat pockets bulging with rubbish until I remembered. Actually, some things never change!!
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
Every time I went abroad to work I learnt more about myself than I would have done in an entire lifetime of staying in the UK. If you are living and working in your own country, people will have expectations of you and they will place limitations on you. This is because they ‘know’ you and what you are capable of. When you go abroad to live and work you will stand or fall on your own abilities and achievements. Fewer excuses and allowances will be made for you but fewer constraints will be placed upon you.
I first went abroad to work in 1986 as an International Scout on a summer camp in Florida. My age and my lack of experience were incredibly telling. I was awful for the bulk of my time there as I couldn’t really do anything particularly useful. As an immature and sheltered 21 year old I had very few skills, either personal or practical, but through the patience of those around me I gradually improved as a member of staff and as a person. It was from a very low base, but I came back with a new idea of myself.
Next I went to Japan for three years and I veered from triumph to disaster and visited all points in between! Along with the teaching, I had a family to try to support emotionally as well as financially. It was an even steeper learning curve than the summer in the US. My other two overseas jobs were disastrous for a number of reasons but those times in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia were pivotal in helping me to continue finding myself as a person.
If you can’t go abroad, join a club that is doing something you have never tried before or go to a new area with a job. I promise that any opportunity you take to take yourself out of your comfort zone will pay dividends.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 