A Friday retirement blog – doing the right thing?

Just a brief Friday retirement blog to ask the question – should I offer, even contrive, work to offer my neighbour because I think he might be struggling financially throughout the lockdown? And before you think I might be writing this blog to put myself in the best possible light, let me tell you, I have done nothing noble during this period.

I wrote many weeks ago that I wanted to look back on this period of my life with pride. At the lowest level I said I wanted to achieve something significant. I passed this off as publishing my vineyard book – available on Amazon etc. But at a higher moral level I’ve done very little.

True we have made donations to the musicians who are out of work at this time. We have bought bread and stuff from our local café that’s doing take-aways and yes, I’ve bought stuff from my local DIY shop who opens Mondays and Fridays. I also tried to buy plants from local producers. But they’re hardly Nobel Prize winning actions, are they.

So we do keep an ear open for anything we can do usefully. Mrs Summerhouse making masks and bags for the NHS as well as virtually running her yoga class. So that has made some unhappy people a little bit happier. But again it’s modest. So yesterday my neighbour and I were discussing the work that needed doing on my van. I offered him £50 to take the van to this garage he was recommending. He couldn’t because it was closed. I’ve lost track and what businesses can open and which cannot. But, if not now then soon, I hope he will take up the offer.

Which made me think, given he’s not at work, how’s he doing. So I thought I will get him to cut my hedges. We recently had them all professionally cut right down so we could, in the future, do the work ourselves, so we didn’t need him to do it but I thought it might be a way of helping out without appearing to be overtly charitable.

But then I thought, he might not see it that way and that’s where my doubts about the right thing to do came in. I am much more comfortable making any gestures at a local level rather than to a big organisation of the sort who keep appearing on Facebook. We already did this before the virus came along. So local felt good.

But as I say we’ve not done very much of it, hence the neighbour idea. I can hardly ask him, how you doing, do you need any financial help? That would be patronising, but the intention is the same.

This dilemma brought back to me a passage from Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (sad to say I’ve never been able to find the quote, altho’ I did find the book as above) when trying to quote it accurately so I’ll have to settle for what I think was the gist of it. Which was about people protesting by marching in the civil rights demo on Washington DC.

He said something along the lines of when you protest you climb on the ladder of taking action. Some people just marched, some marched and got into confrontations with the police (is this sounding familiar?), others had to get themselves arrested, others got beaten up. But, he wrote whatever you do, at some level you have to climb off the ladder and, and this was his point, you didn’t feel any better whatever stage you got off. You hadn’t done enough.

Where am I going with this? Not sure. I think it’s a weird version of me feeling we hadn’t done enough but that whatever we’d done we’d never have thought it enough. Is this simply a justification for not taking enough action? Probably. Even if I’d taken up the NHS offer of voluntary work at some point it would have to stop and I wouldn’t have felt I’d done enough even then.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying it’s OK to do nothing in times of need, just that whatever you do for some people (that would be me) it will never feel like it’s enough. So my final point, do your bit, small though it may be and don’t beat yourself up for not doing more.

finally, there is a broader point here as it applies to retirement generally and I think it vaguely relates to the keep it simple blog. The message is, don’t constantly be pushing yourself to do more in your retirement age. Keeping it simple can be doing the right thing.