New Beginnings
Spring Clean & renovation
I have been getting rid of a couple of tonnes; yes I do mean tonnes, of reports and analytical work for the hundreds of companies for whom I worked. Letters, proposals, programmes of work, training material, floppy discs, slides even overhead projectors and portable screens. I found it difficult to let go of this kind of stuff because it is from the time when my brain was at its most effective, and so disposal is like letting go of life itself. As a result, no longer can I imagine that a future student will learn something from my experiences, nor can those things which meant so much to me, ever live on in the life of someone else: It has gone forever.
Hundreds of my old books have also gone and, during the clearance, I found address books going back to the 1950s, a time when I first set foot on the ladder to management and then consultancy. These books list hundreds of Manufacturing Companies few of which exist today. Names such as Windleys, Bentley Engineering, Wildt, Mellor-Bromley, John Heathcoat, Martin Emprex and Towel & Cursley. All this material represents the thousands of people who have touched my life during the past 62 years of work, and I am grateful for the lessons they taught me and for their kindness in overlooking my errors and oddities. At least I like to think that’s what they did.
Most of us find it difficult to ‘let go’ of things and this also applies to letting go of those ideas and emotions which help to make us who we are. This ‘letting go’ difficulty was partly explained whilst I was studying in Kansas City and came across The Five Stages of Grief. (now amended to seven stages). The Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross studied the state of someone’s mind when it has to confront an event for which it is totally unprepared. She noted that when we are young, our minds have years to prepare for the death of family and so when death occurs we are saddened but not shocked. However, there are times in life when change happens and our unprepared mind is ‘shocked.’ Kübler-Ross describes the five stages through which an unprepared ‘shocked’ mind goes, as it works its way back to ‘a new’ normality. The stages are:
1. Shock & Denial - This stage protects the mind, prevents the emotions from being
overwhelmed, and it may last for weeks.
2. Pain & Guilt - Guilt or remorse may then arise causing mental pain. At this stage some
folk try to hide behind drink or drugs. Others may simply feel impotent and think there is nothing they can do.
3. Anger & Bargaining - (Negotiation)- At stage three, some folk get frustrated and give
way to anger by lashing and blaming someone or something else for the change.
4. Depression, Reflection & Loneliness- Then comes a period of sad reflection when
even encouragement from others may not seem helpful. Despair may seem overwhelming.
5. Acceptance & Hope - During this last stage, the mind accepts the new reality and
becomes focussed on a way forward.
Some profound changes happened during 2016 and, although the minds of some people have not fully worked their way through to acceptance, I have hope that 2017 will prove to be another year in which rural communities such as our own continue to share talents and develop opportunities.
In Pauntley last month, we re-enacted the ancient ceremony in which twelve men light fires and then read out short biographies of the Apostle whose fire they have made. We heard that only St John the Evangelist lived into old age and that all the others were killed because they would not deny what they had seen and experienced. They had started life as ordinary folk but then travelled widely throughout the Middle East, Italy, Persia and India. Paul even went to Spain and France. These early apostles had themselves, been through the five stages on our list but had finally accepted that their lives had been changed forever. Their destinies were forged in their acceptance of the realities that their friend who they had seen killed and buried, was the same one with whom they had subsequently shared conversation and food….
My first paragraph however, which highlighted the difficulty of accepting today and letting go of yesterday, reminds me of a bulletin board outside a church in Blue Springs Missouri which read:
Ladies, don’t forget the jumble sale on Friday at 7pm. It’s a great chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping in the house.
P.S. Bring your husbands.
[View from the Pew]
Jobs for Feb
February
Spring is on the horizon.
This is the month when the first signs of the approaching spring begin to show, bulbs poking their green shoots above the dark earth, the light and temperatures increase and the wildlife is waking up.
In the garden:
1. Prepare vegetable seed beds, and sow some vegetables under cover
2. Chit potato tubers
3. Protect blossom on apricots, nectarines and peaches
4. Net fruit and vegetable crops to keep the birds off
5. Prune winter-flowering shrubs that have finished flowering
6. Divide bulbs such as snowdrops, and plant those that need planting 'in the green'
7. Prune Wisteria
8. Prune hardy evergreen hedges and renovate overgrown deciduous hedges
9. Prune conservatory climbers such as bougainvillea
10. Cut back deciduous grasses left uncut over the winter, remove dead grass from evergreen grasses
[Royal Horticultural Society]
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