IF WE WERE ALL TO WAIT FOR THE PERFECT THING AND THE PERFECT TIME, WE WOULD PROBABLY HAVE TO WAIT FOR A LIFETIME — SO DO IT NOW AND IT MAY SEEM EASIER THAN YOU THINK

the lifetime of the opportunity’.

I was at a play in the Peacock last week. Entitled Come on Home, by Philip McMahon, the play is a searing work dealing with family dysfunction in small town Ireland laden with sex, death, abuse, drink, religion, and has the corpse of an Irish mammy and a clerical gay relationship thrown in for good measure.

In one of the play’s most stark and powerful lines, Martina, one of the women characters, warns a younger woman thinking of emigrating: “There is no such thing as a fresh start, young wan.”

And there isn’t, even when it comes to adult and later life education, we bring all of ourselves — our history, our foibles, our formation and our malformation to every task and every project. We bring it all to the thing we always wanted to learn or the thing we always wanted to explore, or the thing we always wanted to do. Some describe what we bring as ‘baggage’ as if it is external to us, but the clutter is us — it is who we are.

Writing oneself out of the script and blaming ‘the baggage’ is a real temptation. My octogenarian friend and serial entrepreneur believes in writing and re-writing the script.

“In life,” he says, “one should not be put off too easily — it is always better to do something and hope it will be the right thing. If we were all to wait for the perfect thing and the perfect time, we would probably have to wait for a lifetime — so do it now and it may be easier than you think.”