I am currently reading The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen: 83 1/4 Years Old. The book is a fictional diary of an elderly gentlemen living in a care home in Amsterdam. The book includes the wit and wisdom of this elderly gentleman as he observes the characters, happenings and world around him.
As I move into my own retirement, I felt particularly connected to the story by the following text:
I, Hendrikus Gerardus Groen, am ever the civil, ingratiating, courteous, polite, and helpful guy. Not because I really am all those things, but because I don’t have the balls to act differently. I rarely say what I want to say. I tend to choose the path of least confrontation. My specialty: wanting to please everybody. My parents showed foresight in naming me Hendrik: you can’t get any blander than that. I’ll wind up spiraling into depression, I thought. That’s when I made the decision to give the world a little taste of the real Hendrik Groen. I hereby declare that in this diary I am going to give the world an uncensored exposé: a year in the life of the inmates of a care home in North Amsterdam.
Well okay, maybe I’m not going to be quite that bold, but I do plan to express my thoughts, feelings and opinions more openly going forward in life. And this blog is just the start of that.
