Celebrating 33 Years

The 4th January marks 33 years since I said "I do" in the atmospheric and historic Temple Church in London, surrounded by family, friends, and the echoes of centuries past. I wore a dress made by my stepsister and both my sisters were bridesmaids. Reflecting on this milestone, I’m struck by the resonance of the number 33—a number deeply tied to cycles, beginnings, and growth.

The moon takes 33 years to complete its full solar cycle, so tonight is the first time, since my wedding, that the moon is back in its original position. I intend to go outside tight and look into the night sky. The lunar calendar, with its 33-year cycle, shows that life often brings us back to where we began, albeit with new perspectives and deeper wisdom. Just as the moon waxes and wanes, our journey together has seen moments of light and shadow. The shadow can help you appreciate the light.

Staying on the theme of 33 - the human spine has 33 vertebrae, serving as the central support system for the body. Our marriage, like a backbone, has had to be strong and flexible - capable of withstanding the pressures of time while adapting to new circumstances. We are certainly very different from how we were 33 years ago.

Over the past three decades, we’ve navigated change, celebrated triumphs, and weathered challenges. Our two sons are, without doubt, my highlights. Each has developed into a clever, independent, successful young man led by clear values and I know that they have great futures ahead of them.

My anniversary is not just a celebration of the past but a reminder to continue evolving, adapting, and finding strength in shared experiences. Whether in personal relationships or professional endeavours, the lesson remains the same: resilience, growth, and renewal go hand in hand.

Here’s to embracing life’s cycles, cherishing the past, and looking forward to the journey ahead.

#AnniversaryReflections #CyclesOfLife #33YearsStrong

It's not all dark - Day 28

Day 28 (Thursday 28th December 2017)

28 December is, for many Christians, a day of distressing contemplation - it is
The Feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates the death of blameless male infants
slaughtered by King Herod in his attempt to destroy the newly born Jesus. You might be
interested to know that the 28 December is also the date when, in 2013, China eased its
One-Child policy, which had for many years resulted in the death of thousands of predominantly female infants.

We have our office Christmas Party this evening. Many firms, due to the diverse nature of the workforce have "Winterval" parties or a seasonal event, however, being a long-established UK business, we are remain traditional. 

Today's post is by the executive coach and company director Tony Jackson, who is well known to many on social media. He has a number of Twitter handles (depending on why/how you know him) - @Jacksont0ny is his personal account, @ChelshamConsult is his company account and lastly @t0nyjPhotos is his "third place" where you can often see some of his wonderful photos (as indeed you can in today's post as al the illustrations have been taken by Tony himself). Tony writes a fine blog that you can find on his business website, Chelsham.co/blog. Tony commenced his career by training to become an accountant before realising that he had a greater interest in people as opposed to numbers. He lives with his husband, Andrea, in South West London. His take on darkness and dawn is very personal and touches on difficult subjects, but it also has much to do with his penchant and talent for photography.

************************

My immediate reaction to this Advent Blog series’ theme was to ponder whether darkness is a negative and dawn a positive – or whether both can be either.  

Without darkness we cannot see the amazing glory of the night sky, it is harder to rest or sleep and some creative experiences cannot happen. We dim the lights for a reason, don’t we? Horrors dawn on us do they not?

In that light here is my offering, perhaps more a stream of consciousness than a blog this time……

Darkness

It took me 30 years of adult life to work out that the times when I haven’t been anywhere near at my best, when I haven’t really understood my own reactions to events around me, be it at play or at work, I have often been driven by anxiety.

There. I said it.

Most people I meet or with whom I work wouldn’t notice – I can cover it well.

However, anxiety has taken me to some dark places over the years and, in extremis, was even the catalyst for one of the very few ‘bad days’ in my relationship.  Over a decade ago (the year of two awful events which I mention below) my panic attack in a crowd ruined a long-awaited treat for my wonderful husband. Of course neither of us realised at the time that it had been a panic attack. A boss once asked me, baffled, why I had ducked out of an important team gathering. A workmate noticed that a real career success had only bred insecurity (“when will it be taken away from me?”). Hello Imposter Syndrome.

Good friends and relatives know that I sometimes have to work through anxieties to turn up to events. Friends laugh with me when they hear me say ridiculous things such as “will we get a table?” (answer of course: “if not we’ll go somewhere else”). In the mix is PTSD emanating from teenage experiences plus a physical assault at the age of 40 when I thought, I believed, I was in a safe space. Add to that the awfulness of the man I love being in that square when the bus blew up on 7/7  - this within weeks of the assault. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near there but had been displaced as events unfolded. The last message I received was “I’m getting on a bus at Euston”. Those two hours waiting to reach him were the longest of my life and then I had to work through the guilt of feeling so damaged even though neither of us had actually been hurt physically. Unlike so many.

I managed to reach out for help and we all need to recognise that not everyone can or will. It’s also why I started going to my detox retreats. I have discovered ways of self-soothing/self-healing and I commend this to you.

Being able to recognise this as anxiety has been the most remarkable breakthrough and has changed my life. I have a label for it. I can ask what the feeling is telling me instead of being confused about it. I know, yes I know, that I am a better person (and a better coach come to think of it) for having broken out of something which I simply thought was ‘my dark place’. A dark place which was worse at times than if the thing about which I was anxious had actually happened. What a waste of energy.

But if I have a plea it is this……please remember that if a colleague (be it the composed HRD or a successful, generally acutely self-aware executive coach ☺ ) is being a little ‘different’ at times there is almost always a reason. There may be interference in the form of anxiety or other mental health issues. We aren’t good enough at supporting colleagues with such issues and organisations which get this right will reap the rewards in terms of employee loyalty.  

On the other hand….

Darkness can be a place from which beauty emanates.

Photography is my ‘third place’.  The light I allow in through that shutter into the dark innards of my Nikon can create art.

I am at my happiest, and least anxious, mooching around with my camera then messing around on Lightroom (not in a dark room these days) in order to tweak the end results. I do it for me. Only for me.

That said I take genuine pleasure from others’ reactions to my work and have even splashed out on a website http://tonyjacksonphotography.com which is also for me but for you too …. if you want it.

Dawn

2017 was a year of dawning realisation for people who belong to minority groups – as do I. I know that I have enjoyed privilege as a white male but I have also experienced life as a gay man and I am troubled, anxious you might say, about the changes in the western world. (Let’s not talk about the 70 or so countries which we cannot visit for fear of imprisonment or worse).

Or are they actually changes? I thought that we had become more enlightened, that more people had learned to accept difference even if they did not or could not understand. I had taken heart from the vibrancy and multiculturalism of London 2012. I had read too much into what I perceived to be more inclusive times. That we had left behind the dark days of Section 28, of repeated failed attempts to introduce an equal age of consent and of zero employment law protection.  I and others had a false sense of security.

The dawning realisation? That the enlightened times which I thought we could take for granted were perhaps a mirage. Just look at some parts of Twitter from the perspective of a black man or a trans woman or a friend from another EU country or a refugee. Such hatred. Such unfiltered bigotry. Such joy in castigating difference. Maybe we had only suppressed it all – maybe it had never gone away.

It is deeply depressing and one has to work hard, really hard, to accentuate the positive. For we risk heading backwards and it falls to all of us both to fight prejudice and to shed positive light on the lives of others.  To be unpopular if needed as we stand up for others. To say that we will not allow a return to the darkness into which we know our fellow humans can descend.

And yet, I am delighted to say, there has been a dawning of even greater happiness for me this year.

Along came this chap – Dudley.

He radiates joy. He has the world’s waggiest tail (that’s official by the way). He is always happy to see me. He cures that anxiety. Most of the time. For sometimes it is I who is anxious when he is home alone. He just contentedly chews on his antler. He is a revelation.

Then, much more importantly, after 18 years together, and 10 years on from our civil partnership, Andrea and I married. For that is what we now can do. Let’s note that it was the much-maligned Coalition Government which made this happen. And they even set it up so that our marriage is backdated to the date of our CP. So we also had that dawning thought that, in one fell swoop, we had been married for a decade. Happy Tin Anniversary to us. Yay!

And can we all please notice that the only thing that has happened as a result of this legal change is that more people, their friends and their families have experienced merriment and joyfulness?

Not a completely dark time then.

 

Darkness is not to be feared - Day 23

Day 23 (Saturday 23rd December 2017)

23 December is the busiest day for travel over the festive period and is often the busiest day
for the whole year, with queues at airports and ports, overcrowded trains and heavy congestion
on roads. In the UK alone there will be over 12 million drivers travelling at least 20 miles (source the AA)

We had a wonderful family meal last night, but today I need to brave the seasonal traffic and get back to London to sort out Christmas for my immediate family at home. I have a lot of things to prepare and wrap.  

Today's post is by my good friend Michael Carty. Michael is a popular voice in HR circles and on social media. He has acted as a focal point for a wide global community for many years (his handle is @MJCarty, and you can read his excellent blog on Tumblr). He is a delightful man, consistently respectful and polite - mindful of the views and feelings of others. Michael works as an editor for XpertHR and is a benchmarking specialist. When not analysing data and making complex matters simple for us lesser mortals, Michael shares his impressions of the world and is a gifted artist who appreciates what he finds around him. He is very well read (from comics to biographies), loves film (especially Star Wars) and is a music aficionado. He is also a loving husband and a loyal, entertaining and much-valued friend.

************************

Black and white, yin and yang, dark and dawn. An intertwining as old as time, as old as life, as old as human lives and hearts.

The miracle of written communication would not exist without this beautiful contrast of dark and light. Pen glides across paper, typewriter hammer leaves its impression, keystroke begets pixel, each enabling the words in our mind to be seen, understood and felt by others.

I believe I have seen every dawn this year. My body clock hates me. The older I get, the worse my ability to remain asleep past the laughably early hours becomes. These are the times of day most people only imagine. My brain has decided, with age, to be wide awake in these unimaginable times. John Updike wrote in his autobiography Self-Consciousness that he loved to sleep late, to let the world get started without him. You have no idea how much I envy him this.

I have had to learn to love both the darkness of the end of the night and the light of dawn. I have had to make the most of this enforced wakefulness. I truly love these times now. I would not trade them for anything.

Weekend early mornings are perhaps my favourite times. The dark and light of strong coffee in a white cup. Immersive, hypnotic music playing (perhaps aptly for the theme our endlessly generous hostess Kate has chosen, the Dawn of Midi’s album Dysnomia is on this minute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH4lkK-vSco).

The unfolding black and white of letters as I stumble to form words for my blog (or, in this case, for Kate’s). My mind feels peace and wakefulness, the week’s pent-up conscious and unconscious musings allowed free as night’s darkness slowly gives way to dawn.

Filtered by the smog

I have had two horrible, worrying bouts of illness this year. The second bout of illness knocked me out for most of last month. Shingles, I learned, is no joke, despite what its innocuous, almost friendly name might suggest. "It will make you feel pretty grotty," said the doctor who diagnosed my ailment. He was onto something. A lot of feeling rotten and a lot of rest was in order.

At times like these, the words you need to hear will find you. My recovery was aided by the most wonderful book, The Rise, The Fall and The Rise by Brix Smart Smith. The extraordinary story of an extraordinary life, told in the most extraordinarily vivid language. Good times, bad times, Brix has had her share. "Nothing is better than something that's bad," her biological father told her. We can and should learn the lessons of our darkest times, so that we can fully appreciate the light when it returns.

I blogged recently about this wonderful book (to read it follow this link), so I will not repeat myself here. I am stunned and humbled that Brix actually read my blog post, and tweeted some kind words about it.

I drew a picture of Brix to accompany the post.

Halfway through drawing this picture, I realised the subconsciously apt colour choices I had made, given that one of many highpoints of Brix’s time with The Fall was the collaboration with dancer Michael Clark (I imagine his name will be known to Kate) which resulted in the album I Am Kurious Oranj. I was subsequently amazed to read that Brix found the picture evocative of dawn and early morning in the California of her youth:

"Quite kurious..... it looks like the colour of the hazy early morning sunshine light of my 1960s L.A. upbringing. Dappled through the sycamore trees and filtered by the smog."

A different view of darkness

My first bout of illness this year, back in the Spring, gave me a different view of darkness. I had a very allergic reaction to an insect or spider bite (the precise cause remains undiagnosed) on my left hand. The toxin started to track rapidly up the veins of my left forearm, plotting a worrisome trajectory towards my heart. The poison’s progress was obvious, the vein and the area around it becoming inflamed. A visit to A&E resulted in a prescription of very strong antibiotics.

The effect of the first dose of antibiotics was overpowering. Back home from A&E, I lay in bed feeling a profound, all-encompassing darkness engulfing my vision and my mind from the edges. At first my mind tried to fight against it, to remain alert and awake. But I realised there was no messing with this medication. I had no choice but to surrender to the darkness, to trust that it wanted to heal me. The alert reader who spots that I am alive to write these words will perhaps already have twigged that, thankfully, the antibiotics did their trick. As much as I wanted to resist this enveloping darkness, it was not to be feared.

The best decision of my life

I got married in June this year. Just as my lovely friend Laurie Ruettimann said it would be, this was the best decision of my life. My happiest moment this year was during the ceremony, the ancient power of the words of the wedding vows producing a joy that overwhelmed me (yet somehow I didn’t blub - at least not there and then in the registry office). The wedding day fell during a heatwave. The whole week was sweltering, sultry, dreamlike.

The day after the wedding was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. I woke to see the first rays of sun of the longest day, the air around me scented by roses.

Softest night loosened its grip over the world.

Darkness is not to be feared.

As transporting as that dawn was, the most beautiful dawn is always tomorrow’s.

Believe.

(Your love keeps lifting me) Higher and Higher

(Your love keeps lifting me) Higher and Higher  

Day 3 (Saturday 3rd December 2016)

3-time winner of the Tour de France, British cyclist Chris Froome,

crossed the finish line arm-in-arm with his Team Sky mates on 24th

July 2016. Froome won in 2013, 2015 and 2016 and is the first man to 

successfully defened his title for over 20 years. He is just the 8th rider

to win at least 3 Tours de France, joining Belgium's Phillipe Thys,

Louison Bobet of France and American Greg LeMond on 3. The record

of 5 Tour wins is held jointly by Jacques Anquetil & Bernard Hinault of

France, Belgium's Eddy Merckz and Miguel Indurain of Spain.

Today's blog is joy to read - it is always a pleasure to find that people's lives are full of love and learning. In this very open and personal piece, Gary Cookson tells us how his life has changed, having rediscovered love and now appreciating the fact that he is both loved and loveable. In some ways his blog can be read as a love letter. It is certainly an honest reflection on his year. If you remember from last year's series, Gary told us (on Boxing Day) what it was like to job-hunt and how, by not trying too hard, he landed a suitable role. Gary, in this year's post, touches on the lingering pain he still feels after 12 years in a housing trust he loved and was proud to have helped, having it change for the worse around him and having to leave. Since February he has been the Director of HR at Trafford College. Gary has high standards and is driven, both in and outside work (he is a triathlete, trainer, tutor, dedicated father and spouse) - he does not shirk from seeking to improve both himself and the environment in which he operates. In this post he touches on the complex issue of having a satisfactory work/life balance.

Gary is a natural networker and active on social media - he tweeted that he was writing this post back in November, without giving anything away. His Twitter handle is @Gary_Cookson. He is also a prolific blogger - you can read his posts on his blog, HR Triathlete or catch many of them on LinkedIn.

Gary has shared with us his own photos that record magical moments from his year.

*************************************************

HEARTS

I got married this year. I'd been married before and the secret joy of marrying again is realising that you made so many mistakes first time round, without even knowing, and by marrying again you get the chance to put right what once went wrong (to steal a Quantum Leap quote). I hadn't realised that, having had my heart torn into tiny shreds some years ago, I had it in me to love again and most importantly to be loved.

In the immediate years after my painful divorce I focused my attention of my children, only having two at the time. I didn't think my heart had capacity to love anyone else and as a human being I became very shallow and self centred as a result, not valuing friendships or relationships.

And then I met Katie, and in time we had our own child, and its obvious that ones' heart DOES have capacity to love more no matter what you think, that it just GROWS.  And as Katie wants us to have another child in the future (no.4 for me if so) I'll probably test that theory further in the years to come.

The wedding was fantastic, taking place on St.George's Beach near Paphos, Cyprus at the end of a week long holiday that I thought I couldn't better but in fact only had to wait a fortnight to do so.

On that day, 26 August, my heart became whole again and I felt loved, and full of love.  I have not experienced a more perfect day and I don't want to.  I found my heart again on St.Georges' Beach, and part of it will always be there.

HEIGHTS

Two weeks after our wedding we went on honeymoon - a cruise round the Norwegian Fjords.  This was something from our bucket-list and the four days we spent in Norway itself saw me reach heights of beauty I didn't even think possible.  Norway is my new favourite place and I'd live there in a heartbeat (if I could afford it).

Honeymoons are invariably special events and I truly believe I may never experience those heights again, though I'll try. I certainly don't plan on having another honeymoon, partly because I want it to be some kind of pinnacle in my life.

Bergen was spectacular, ascending the funicular Floibanen to Mt.Floyen and looking down on what seemed like the whole of Norway. But we hadn't seen anything yet.  Standing at the bottom of the Trollveggen the following day in Andalsnes made me realise how the heights of Norway were something I could spend my entire life scaling.  And even then we hadn't got to the best bit - walking up the mountain to the Briksdal Glacier in Olden exposed me to a level of peace and beauty, a new height altogether, that I didn't think I'd ever experience.  Standing in front of the glacier, I have never felt so calm and had all my senses heightened so much.

 

I'd love to go back, to try to experience those heights again.

So this year for me, on a personal level, has been all about hearts and heights.

HOLLOWS

My hollows have been entirely professional this year.  Something has been missing.  I don't know what.  I feel as if, professionally, I'm searching for something and until I find it, I'll be hollow.

I started the year leaving the organisation I'd spent 12 years turning into an amazing workplace, and then 1 year watching it change around me and all my work be undone.  I used this story in my Ignite-Max poem at #CIPDNAP16 and tried to express how hollow the whole experience had made me, but also how it had helped me realise how I can rebuild and start again, something I've been doing in my new role since I started in the early part of the year.

But even now, the hollow feeling persists.  Something's not quite right, professionally, and the sharp contrasts with how high I've flown in my personal life haven't helped by exposing an area that isn't as perfect for me, so I've clearly got work to do.

The feeling actually makes me angry at times, irritable and short-tempered, which isn’t the person I want to be.

I guess I'm searching for something to fill the hollowness inside me.  But I don't know what it is that will fill it or even if I'll feel less hollow when I find it.

All I do know is that, if and when I figure it all out - watch out.