Lord Ric of Beckley Furnace: When the winds of changes shift

Hi everyone!

First blog of Season 2021 !

If over the last decade you have been – even an occasional – reader of Lord Ric’s blogs you’ll be expecting some unlikely, oft-told Tales from the Deckchairs up at the Cromwell Road end, Hove Actually; where Sussex have played their cricket since 1872.

Tales of dare-doing by Lord Ted and Young Jim from over half a century ago …

Of Chris Adams hitting Shane Warne for six, high over the pavilion …

The evening that Tymal Mills bowled Chris Gayle – the Million Dollar Ball.

But today it is time to try something altogether different: a Book Review.

As for the author, well back in the 1980s she was the author of the two best books ever written about cricket tours.

Of England playing against the West Indies and down under against the Aussies.

Tours where you didn’t need Kipling to tell you that it was wise to:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same

In amongst some great stories of well-loved cricketers, there was sage advice:

I have always been physically afraid of people whose body weight in kilos

is numerically higher than their IQ

So when – some 35 years after her previous book – Frances Edmonds wrote Repotting Your Life, for me it was a Must Read !!

The idea for the book is developed from a plaque Ms Edmonds saw on her first day at Stanford, California where she was to spend an academic year at the Distinguished Careers Institute:

Repotting, that's how you get new bloom...

you should have a plan of accomplishment and when that is achieved you should be willing to start off again."

Ernest C. Arbuckle, former Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean, 1958-1968

For all those who learnt from Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galay that 42 is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”, we now discover that 47.2 is the age of deepest desolation.

Happily well over two decades ago for me !!

But old age does bring its challenges - for this is the heart of the dilemma that Repotting seeks to answer …

If, like me, you'll never again see sixty, it's increasingly likely that your 'hybrid problem' may be rooted in that fact that extended life expectancy has left you at a loose end in your elongated life.

You feel full of hard earned experience and wisdom and are still enthusiastic to contribute, but you're stymied by the lack of opportunities, culture or institutions designed to help you make the most of your extra gifted years.

You feel frustrated at being shunted up the sidings of life when there's still plenty of juice left in the tank.

The book sets out a 4-stage process:

In the face of negative belief patterns, the book recommends using the ‘Name-Tame-Reframe’ technique to distance yourself.

Wisely, it proposes that “in the face of a black-hole problem, acceptance is the first step on the road to progress.”

Further advice - not least if you have spent a lifetime following Sussex and their but only occasional successes – is:

In the world of regular repotters, where optimism is almost a moral duty, the attitude of pure pessimism gets an understandably bad rap. As a realistic compromise, however, I'd like to make the case for an attitude of constructive pessimism.

With its associated feelings of confusion and frustration, constructive pessimism can be a positive sign.

Discontentment can sometimes be the fuel that keeps you moving forward on the right track. It can also be the signal that alerts you to the fact that you're onto something worth pursuing.

I definitely liked the “value of intergenerational learning, teaching and mentoring.”

Truly, “the need for social connection does not fade as you grow older.”

And – but of course – I strongly identified with the three unassailable advantages: enormous enthusiasm, total ignorance, and a burning desire to [give it a] go.

As Napoleon told his Generals: On s'engage et alors on voit - Give It A Go !!

Ms Edmonds tackles the great watershed moments in all our lives … not least for those England cricketers she wrote about 30+ Seasons ago who all have had to face up to the inevitability of Retirement, with 30+ Seasons of working life to come:

Moving on from the accomplishments you've worked hard to achieve over a lifetime is never easy.

It's inevitable that the skills, experiences and education that you've acquired thus far have become part of your core identity, the label that you use to think about yourself and that you use to identify yourself to others.

It is very tempting, therefore, to keep defaulting to the person you were before you engaged on your repotting journey.

But the sooner you can move on from the things that previously defined you, the sooner you'll experience the freedom of exploration and the fun of finding new ' bedding-in' fellows.

As Tony Blair said: “You can’t organise the future with a playbook from the past."

Just as there were in those much-loved cricket books, so Repotting is full of Top Tips:

Although life is lived forwards, it is understood backwards.

Research has shown that being grateful for what you have an actively alter your brain chemistry and generate a cheerful outlook ….it ends up being real.

As many as 60 million Americans feel sufficiently isolated to identify loneliness as a major source of unhappiness in their lives.

One more from me:

"Learn from the mistakes of others.

You can't live long enough to make them all yourself."

Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed

Lord Ric blogs are usually based around the telling of a story … of a favourite player, of a game that went to the final ball – Sussex to Win !!.

On story-telling, Ms Edmonds writes that:

One of the most enduringly transformative exercises that I undertook at Stanford was the requirement to share my ' Life Story' in a twenty-minute presentation.

When I tell you that each member of our fellowship cohort, which was packed with many highly successful and competitive individuals, was required to share their personal history, sounds like a gilt-edge guaranteed recipe for some truly ghastly one-upmanship.

Counter-intuitive though it might sound, this exercise did more than anything else to bind us all together with a sense of mutual empathy and community. Digging deep, often with painful honesty, to establish what it was about ourselves that had remained the same throughout our lives and what it was that had happened to us that had precipitated change, proved to be a profoundly cathartic experience.

No matter what our background and no matter who we were, we all recognised each other as fellow pilgrims travelling together on a quest for personal transformation.

I was reminded rambling out on the Camino to Santiago. There are only three questions Pilgrims ask:

· Where do you come from?

· Where are you going?

· Why are you walking the Camino?

As in so many lives:

“a few common threads emerged clearly from the glorious cornucopia of personal stories…

If their stories were anything to go by, the most crucial lesson that every member of my repotting family had assimilated was that hard work, discipline and conscientiousness are better guarantors of personal and professional success than any amount of raw talent.”

Whilst aptitude is counted on the arithmetic sale, attitude is logarithmic.

I’ll let Ms Edmonds decide who scored well on which scale in those England XIs long ago !!

And if you only had time to read one paragraph of the Repotting ...

The final paragraph of the Acknowledgements says it all:

Insatiable curiosity + Infectious zest for life = Natural repotters

And Finally

------------

Like all good reads I didn’t want Repotting to end.

Rather like Life itself …

Life is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end.

Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

This is a must-read book for all who want to keep on “growing … [and who have] the determination to discover delight in the rich diversity of life, the curiosity to dance with change and the ability to find the fun of good fellowship.”

Good fellowship , eh …

Why not come at join me up at the Cromwell Road end for some cricket watching…

See you soon!!

Lord Ric of Beckley Furnace

PS - Piper on Potting

I hope that it is OK to pen a few words on Potting.

The title of this review is “When the winds of changes shift .“

The quote comes from Forever Young by Bob Dylan

May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift

Everyone - even Lord Ric who has spent a lifetime ‘ Idylling & Idling ’ up in the Deckchairs at Hove - has had to face up to the winds of change shifting.