I like challenges now I’m retired. Many of them, unlike in my working days, are self-set but that’s OK. It means I have some control as to how many and the degree of challenge in the challenges. I suppose what I should say is I like challenges that aren’t too challenging.
I have something of a habit of setting myself challenges that I cannot ‘rise to’. They just generate stress without any sense of achievement and that’s plain foolish, retired or not. Of course you don’t always know before you set off whether a challenge is going to be achievable or motivating or not, interesting or not. But there needs to be some judgement made before we blithely set off scattering failed challenges as we go.
Last night (Monday) could have been another one of those stressful challenges. But this last week or so I’ve rather had enough of challenges – self-set and imposed – so I decided, I’ll make a judgement, quiet an easy one as it turned out. To hell with another challenge, we’ll go to the pub for a meal and a bottle of wine. A decision popular with humans and dogs alike.
The previous week, as you may have read, was full of health and family challenges and DIY type tasks (the garage roof) and they’ve been hard. But against those short-term irritants there have been my musical aspirations and they have been going on for a while and they are largely self-imposed and mostly, at this point, more rewarding.
Last night was the first of the Monday night ‘gigs’. They’re the open-to-the-public sessions that used to be on Friday but have now been moved to a Monday night, the same night as the jazz classes. So every fourth week there is a gig rather than a class.
This is something to do with professional musicians being able to find better paid work on a Friday night than on a Monday night. So the ‘house-band’ is more prepared to do Monday night than Friday. It’s less money for them but that’s better than no money at all for a typical Monday night. At least that was how the change was explained to me.
Fair enough, the only way it might matter to me is that I might be more inclined to attend the gig on Monday than Friday as I’m used to going out on a Monday night (as winter draws on this becomes more of a consideration for us old folk and in fact after Saturday’s weather it could be considered as having drawn on).
You might remember that public appearances have been quite stressful for me in the past although I did do the summer school public performance last August. So maybe the gig would be less of an effort being on a Monday although still, I guess, just as much of a challenge.
The reasoning is sound but, as I say, it didn’t work for me last Monday night because I was all challenged out. But I don’t want you to think that I’m settling for the quiet life in my retirement. This wouldn’t be true generally and certainly not musically even though I did blob on the gig on Monday last.
The reason I can state this, without fear of contradiction, is because I have joined another music group on a Thursday night. And this a very different one to my jazz night. Yes siree, Bob. I have joined the Leeds Folk Fiddle Group (LFFG). They were advertising for new members and you didn’t have to be a fiddle player.**
I must admit the music itself has come as something of a surprise. I thought they would be playing Irish / Celtic tunes like the ones at the pub (The Chemic) I wrote about some time ago. I thought this group might be a somewhat more supportive environment for me to improve my guitar playing. And it is, they’re very nice.
Did I mention I’m playing guitar in this group? But the tunes are much more varied and, in some cases, challenging (that word again) than the more ‘straight forward’ Irish tunes. They’re Polish and Czechoslovakian from all sorts of places with all kinds of chords, in all different keys and time signatures. But I must say it gives me a real sense of satisfaction to be able to switch from one instrument to another, albeit badly. Some of the new chords don’t suit my arthritis but this is a challenge, right?
The number of guitar players seems to vary quite a lot in the three weeks I’ve been attending the sessions. From one to four. If there’s more than one I can always play quietly over those unfamiliar tunes, so it’s not too threatening. It’s early days yet and it may not prove suitable for me. But at the moment this is a challenge I’m finding interesting and not super intimidating.
So overall all good in the challenges of retirement department. At least for the last week I’ve been able to choose my challenges and that has meant they’re both more achievable not to mention more enjoyable. If only all of life’s challenges could be so sensibly managed.
And in fact since I started writing this we’ve been staying at the Derbyshire cottage. The only challenges there (we’re back now) were whether to buy any more antique items and so continue making it more of our home and less of my late mother’s (although she’s still there). Given we have no immediate plans to sell the house, the decision to continue to decorate it (clutter it Mrs Summerhouse would say), has been an easy one and there’s nothing I like more than looking for antique shop bargains. This is the kind of challenge I am definitely up for.
*Mrs Summerhouse thinks I’ve used the word ‘challenge’ too often in this retirement blog and she may very well be right. Trouble is, try as I might, I couldn’t find another word that meant the same. I even went to the trouble of theosaurusing it, something I’ve never done before in these blogs and the closest I got was ‘task’. But that didn’t seem quite right, so that’s why there are so many ‘challenges’.
**I do own a fiddle or violin as I used to call it before joining the group. I bought it from my sister-in-law with a definite intention of setting myself the challenge of learning to play it but that’s one challenge that definitely got away. I still have it but it just sits up in the attic alongside my guitars.