In 1994 I bought a book. Today I looked for it on my bookshelves and couldn’t find it. I did find the follow-up to the one I was looking for the one in the picture above. Both books were written by Stephen R. Covey something of a hero of mine way back then. And bloody hell, by my calculations, that was over thirty years ago. Where does the time go?
The book I wanted to consult was titled The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Way back then that’s what I aspired to be and the fact that there were only 7 of them, well how difficult could that be? Without laying my hands on the first book I couldn’t tell you what the habits were or if they still apply to the retired person.
What I can remember is that the 7 habits came under the 4 broad areas of human need of Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy. The Live one covered our physical needs – food, clothing shelter, economic well-being, health. The love and learn ones speak for themselves I think. The one that interested me least at that time was the need ‘to leave a legacy’. That seemed so far in the future as to be bordering on the irrelevant. Ha.
Well now it doesn’t seem so. A conversation with a friend recently about this very topic brought the subject to mind. I said I didn’t think I would leave much of a legacy (I was thinking professional legacy, she was not). I must admit that I do hope to leave a legacy of some kind to my nearest and dearest as they say.
Apart from the soppy stuff I will be leaving various legacies to my children. To my daughter I shall leave getting on for 80 Wisden Cricket Almanacs (see above picture of some of them) and to my son my precious but increasingly difficult to drive Land Rover Defender (see next picture). The vineyard I leave to both of them and good luck with it.
I can truly say that I’m hugely relieved that I have children to leave these legacies to. Thank God we’re not like some friends of ours who have no children. They’re quite well off and I asked him once who they were going to leave their ‘worldly goods’ to? We’ve got a list of charities that will benefit he said, or words to that effect. Well that’s nice and we make quite a few donations to charity but I’m happy that we’re not leaving everything to that particular part of our lives. After all there’s not much point having a legacy if there’s nobody to receive it.
So it’s true that, as I approach my 77th year, leaving a legacy has ceased to become an abstract concept and now feels like a very important aspect of retirement / old age. I look forward to finding out as the years progress just how my views on legacies change, if they do.
By the way, I’m noticing that as this retirement blog progresses it becoming more of a blog about old age and less about retirement per se. And so this blog about leaving a legacy. It’s very much an old age topic isn’t it?
PS. Another ‘by the way’, in looking through the book above I found tucked inside the first page this post-it note from that time (see below). The items represent my ambitions from all those 30 plus years ago. They made me smile especially as I’d managed to achieve most of them. I never did complete or even start my PhD or employ my son, Joe, and ‘relax’ goes down in the debatable column but none of those are a great source of regret at this stage. So that’s good.
