In my blog posted 12th July last year I mentioned my Japanese garden project and my ‘I CAN DO THAT’ attitude. As I am semi-retired, it is a ‘Retirement Project’; a hobby and consequently I am taking my time and enjoying it immensely. It’s a big challenge but exactly how I am achieving it has turned out to be nothing like I had envisaged in July 2018.
The reason has been the difference between how I achieve a work-related project compared to how I just mess about taking my time, ignoring all the best-practice principles when I am doing a retirement project.
I had expected to draw up a plan of what I wanted the garden to look like and all the work that would be needed. However, I was so keen to get started I just began thinning out some overgrown trees and cutting down others, intending to get round to doing some plans a bit later. As I was progressing the job by just thinking and making decisions on the fly, my objective changed; to re-cycling as much of the cut-down timber as I could and creating a rural Japanese Garden, instead of one in the style of the impeccably maintained show gardens with red and black perfectly shaped Tori gates, that I had seen during my visits to the country. This decision had at least 4 advantages; I didn’t need to prepare any plans, I was self-generating a significant amount of the materials I was going to need, I couldn’t really get anything wrong because I wasn’t working to any plans and the finished garden will take a lot less ongoing maintenance than a perfect one.
My original completion date was Christmas 2018, then Easter 2019, then summertime of this year and now it will certainly be completed in a couple more weeks, by the end of November.
I just want to re-assure readers that my retirement philosophies, which include ‘Near enough is good enough’ and ‘Flexible deadlines are OK’ relate only to my semi-retirement life and in no way reflect my very enjoyable working life at Solar Solve, where ‘Perfection’ and ‘On time Every Time’ continue to be the order of the day.
JHL MBE SSL Co. Chairman
