Читать книгу The Hunger to Grow - Peter Nicholls - Страница 9

WHAT’S FOR DESSERT

By the time you are in your late 50’s society is giving you all sorts of encouragements to start thinking about that word retirement. Perhaps those years of paying superannuation contributions can soon legally become available to you. Perhaps it is just a feeling of “how many more years do I want to keep doing this”. Whatever the prompt may be you are increasingly conscious of the need to make some big decisions about what you want to do with the rest of your life.

It’s not unlike the feeling you get when you are getting down to the last few mouthfuls of the main course of a meal. You are starting to think, “I have enjoyed the main course but now I am looking forward to choosing a dessert”. As I suggested earlier:

“What’s for dessert?? I’ve finished the main course and I’m still hungry”.

You constantly have a want to eat food in order to satisfy your hunger. Once you have eaten, you feel temporarily satisfied. But there is another hunger which is never satisfied – the hunger to keep growing, developing your talents, enriching your life and achieving your deepest wants. I call it your life-hunger, the hunger that drives you forward in the best and worst situations, unstoppable until your last breath or the onset of a health condition that overrides that desire.

Your life-hunger sometimes causes you to take little bites, sometimes big bites and there are even times when you might bite off more than you can chew. Life comes back to bite you at times too, but you never lose that innate desire to keep on moving forward in life, growing, flourishing and blossoming. Thinking of your future not as retirement but as enjoying your dessert years heralds the beginning of a new era in which age has no bearing on your outlook on life. The issue of whether or not to keep working will be influenced less by economics and more by your hunger to keep on growing as a person.

How to keep satisfying your hunger to make the most of your personal life potential will continue to be as it has always been - the product of your own unique mix of natural-born talents and passions, garnished with your personal life experiences. Prepared and served in your own way you can produce a lifetime culinary delight that no other chef has created in human history, nor will there be anyone in the future with your particular life ingredients, talents and passions to create quite the same masterpiece.

The Value of Dessert

Say you are enjoying a night out for dinner with family or friends. Your main course was very satisfying and it was also a responsible choice with a good balance of vegetables, and perhaps some fish, red meat or other ingredients that are generally recognized as ‘being good for you’. Someone suggests that you all have a dessert. There is an enthusiastic yes from around the table. Clearly everyone feels that they have done the right thing with their main course and now it’s time to have something that is going to taste great and will be fun to eat.

The menu indicates that there is a wide variety of dessert options from which to choose. Do you choose on the basis of cost? Or do you, within a reasonable context of your available budget, let your imagination run riot as you anticipate having something that you are going to really love eating? Your taste-buds begin salivating as you savour the expectation of how good your dessert will taste, with just the right (to you) texture, colour, aroma and flavour. Everyone around the table is delighting in the fact that they enjoy the right to choose exactly which dessert they want without regard to their normal eating rules or what anyone else is going to choose. There may well be a happy discussion about which each person has chosen.

The experts tell us that while all this is going on, the brain is having a great deal to do with the process. It is exercising your senses of taste, smell, touch, vision, memory of past experiences, and mixing all of these sensations to come up with an answer to the question of what you think you would like to have for dessert. We are told that such decisions – even our choice of dessert - can reflect so much of what we love about life and have done so since the day we were born.

At the conclusion of the meal there is a sense of relaxed satisfaction as the group reflects on how much they enjoyed their meal, especially the dessert. Yes the cost was a factor but the tastes, the richness of the experience and the extent to which they enjoyed themselves was uppermost in their minds. And your choice took into account any impact the experience would have on your continuing health and vitality…didn’t it.

All that to decide on something that is going to satisfy your food hunger for a matter of minutes. What sort of life choices might you come up with if you used this wonderfully-creative, imaginative, personal, individual process for enjoying your dessert years? Nor do you have to make decisions that are going to last for the whole of your remaining life. You can order dessert as often as you wish, just so long as each new decision gives you continuing satisfaction in your hunger to grow, develop and stay fit – mentally, physically and spiritually.

The fact that your food taste buds can reflect so much of your life has equal relevance when it comes to planning what you want to do in your dessert years. We have long understood that everything we do in life can in some way be traced back to our childhood. No matter how revolutionary your dessert years thinking might be compared to your working life, you will always be you and build on your natural growth since birth. You will see more what I mean by this in the later chapter on “My Story”.

How much money will you need to enjoy your dessert years? It’s a question that dominates the issue of planning for retirement. I find this borne out through a Google Alert I have that gives me a weekly list of online articles from all parts of the world about Retirement Planning. Almost always they focus on the financial planning aspects. This was much of the reason behind me writing this book. Not only to get people to think about what they might do in the many years they may statistically-speaking still have ahead of them but to allay many of peoples’ fears about retirement. The word fear is sometimes interpreted as an acronym F.E.A.R. – False Expectations Appearing Real.

By law I cannot help you with your financial planning. I am a lifestyle mentor. I would simply and strongly urge you to seek professional financial planning advice specific to your particular financial circumstances. Not that I don’t have some views on the nature and role of money during my own dessert years to date. I’ve often said, tongue-in-cheek, “if I knew how long I was going to live I’d know how fast to spend my money”. Since I left the fulltime workforce money has of course continued to be necessary to meet my daily needs and some for the more significant needs like a car and the occasional travel. I have however come to regard money less in terms of the amount I have and more about the nature, the role and priority of the money that I have in getting the greatest value out of my remaining years. It’s an excellent time to remember the old saying, be thankful for what you have rather than regret what you don’t have.