Legacy

"What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?"

Winston Churchill

10  October 1908

Dundee

On the morning of the day that my father died I received a message through LinkedIn. It was an invitation from someone I had met at conference a couple of years earlier. They were about to take up a new post as Programme Leader in Industrial and Work Psychology at a university. I was invited to deliver a guest lecture to Masters students on “Values” the following term.  

Under normal circumstances I would have been momentarily very excited and then enormously daunted. Under normal circumstances my mildly timorous reply would have read ‘that’s very kind, could you give me some more information about how many students, how long the talk would need to be etc etc’ and then I would have ruminated on whether I thought I was ’good enough’. 

These were not, however, normal circumstances: I simply said “I would love to come out to play with your MSc peeps”.

As I was growing up one of the main things I remember hearing from my dad was “Don’t just sit there doing nothing, get up and do something”. In many ways what you then went and did was of relatively little importance as long as you were no longer idly wasting time. 

We all have a limited amount of time and we also have little certainty about how much time there is left. My dad was one of those who actively looked for ways to bend his work hours to serve social purpose: for a production manager in industry in the 1970’s this meant striking up a partnership with a local charity that supported adults with learning disabilities to explore the world of work; and in his home life planting trees and growing vegetables without the use of chemicals.

That a lad from the East End of London, who left West Ham Municipal Technical College with just a single certificate to his name, would end up as a company executive Monday to Friday and a quasi French peasant on the weekend could not have been predicted. So as his time sadly ran out, I found fresh determination to make the most of what remains to me, and to do so by seeking to reduce the muddle in the world thereby living up to everything he believed I could be.