This section brings in wider issues that make the maritime aspect of this site so valuable to me. If you have read the Maritime History page, you will know that, besides being fascinated by boats, my interests stretch to the people who sailed in them and what we can learn from them.

The sub-title of this site is a quote from JRR Tolkein, “Not all who wander are lost”. I intend write posts that are categorised and tagged Wandering. I should define what I mean by wandering.

The following from the dictionary best describing my intentions:

To wander: verb (used without object) – to ramble, roam or rove; to go indirectly or casually; to meander; to extend in an irregular course or direction; to move, pass or turn idly; (of the mind, thoughts desires etc.) to take one direction or another without conscious intent.

Wander has other meanings that lean towards aimlessness, loss of direction, going astray and so on. I do not accept these latter meanings for my purpose here. I have direction. I know what I want to achieve – “To uncover what can be learnt from the past that will be of benefit to the future? Can we avoid the fruitless repetitions of previous mistakes?” and to look at these questions in a manageable way – small Bill-size bites. I am not so arrogant as to believe I can save the world by myself but I would like to make a small contribution towards improving it.

I no longer run a professional practice and am no longer responsible for staff, patients, suppliers and all the other groups that I have worked with over the years. I experienced four extraordinary decades and am immensely grateful to all those who supported me. Now I am able to stand back, review  what I have learnt and use it in new ways. I have the freedom to learn. How long I will have it, I don’t know. However, while I have the opportunity, I hope to demonstrate some of the results in posts on this blog.

Studying people  is a lot more complicated than studying boats. John Heron, in a paper on Experiential Research, wrote that “where the human condition is concerned it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong, better to own a fruitful confusion than to mask it with irrelevant precision.”

I like the concept of fruitful confusion as opposed to detailed analysis. I seem to have spent a lifetime analysing.  Hence my desire to go walkabout, to wander, to sail the ocean . . . to see what’s there.

~ ~ ~

(Images by Bill Whateley – the featured image at the top of this page is the path to Steeple Point, the smaller one in the text is a path through Polyrrinia in Western Crete)