Wellbeing on a Thursday

Started Thursday 3rd March 2011 1735 GMT
Words 477
S.I.= 95.6

A year on .......and light has gone back on


A year ago I stepped away from the bull pit of teaching.  The climate in Suffolk schools was indicated recently by the story detailing the effect of top down micro management practices and demands of society on teachers to cure all of it's ills.   I started my own process of establishing a life greater than work balance on this day last year.  On the 2nd December 2010 I stated blogging with the express aim of ordering my reasons and methods of how I had come to make that decision.  More importantly I have used this blog to explore and formulate a game plan for change.  The is blog has been used in part to  establish my own sense of wellbeing and manage a career change in what has been described as  one of the most diffiuclut set of economic circumstances since the 1920s.

I would balance the statement with a conversation I had with a family friend I met in the street yesterday.  This person is the wife of father's former business partner.  She has just retired as teacher after nearly 39 years.  The conversation switched to her own childrens'  experiences of the last year.  She related how her daughter's husband had experienced redundancy three times in the last year.

As we further chatted we moved onto are we really worse off than in the 1920s and 1930s.  Her own father was a Staffordshire farmer during this time.  She could recall her sister who is 20 years older than herself (she comes from  large family as was the case in those times) telling her about the crops her father had to bring home from market and plough in as he could not sell them to anybody.  People did become destitute and follow the Road to Wigan Pier.

Today we do not really have the same constraints as then.  The Welfare state may be being cut but those that sleep on the streets are often there because they choose to escape to that place not because they have to (possibly in a banker free world, I might be drawing too monochromatic a conclusion).

A safety net does exist for those that look for it, we have become over sensitised to story of abuses of the system.  Rightly the ones who take advantage of my diligence in paying my taxes should be exposed.  I also include in this group the leaders of councils who have turned public service into a sector that believes it is doing the same work as private sector PLCs.  I have mentioned before in blogging I believe in a cooperative way of doing business.  Empire builders eventually find they have it collapse around them.  Could we not all benefit from living in a mutually beneficial society that is not part of he ME generation?  Philosophical statement aired.