Saturday 24 July 2021
They gave me a bottle of rather good whisky. And some vouchers for a distillery tour. A smart Mont Blanc pen and leather-bound notepad. A Samsonite laptop bag for my forthcoming time as a neuroscience student. And there was still several hundred pounds left over which I can put towards a holiday later in the year.
More important than the generosity of the leaving gifts was the generosity and warmth of the messages from colleagues in the room and on the video links. Apparently I was highly respected, an inspiration to my work colleagues, a role model, a great mentor.
They had gone to the trouble of hiring out the top floor auditorium for my retirement “celebration” and, as well as the live messages in the room, there were pre-recorded video messages from colleagues as far away as Hong Kong and, in a real surprise, as close to home as my own sitting room from where Clare reminisced about some of my travels around Europe over the previous nine years and cracked a few jokes about the cat.
I did a brief speech telling them, truthfully, that:
“All I ever tried to do was show up at work every day, do a professional job and, in some small way, try to leave things better than I found them. So I am truly touched and humbled to hear these words. I had no idea that I meant this much to people. Thank you.”
I said a few more words, then we hit the bar across the road from the office for a wonderful evening drinking and eating al fresco as the July sun slowly set over the backdrop of gleaming office buildings.
I expected it to be bitter sweet, anticipation of the future tinged with poignancy for the corporate world I will be departing forever in the next two weeks. But there was no sadness, no regret, no doubt, no melancholy as I said final farewells to work colleagues old and young.
I’ve made my decision and
it’s time to move on. It’s time for me to shift from the passenger seat into the
driving seat and steer in a new direction. The past is done; what
matters now is making the most of the future.
