A retirement out of balance. Regular readers of this retirement blog (and I know there are one or two of you) will not need telling that there are three main pillars to my retirement life – this blog, my music and our vineyard. Plus a few other bits and bobs like the dogs, reading, watching TV and going to the pub and a little bit of travel.
Sounds all very fine and, more important, at best it feels like a balanced retirement. Again regular readers will know that I value balance above most other aspects of retirement or even life generally. I have gone as far as to write that a balanced retirement is a happy retirement. Well maybe not exactly happy, in my book, but certainly reasonably contented.
There have been many times when I have considered this balance and felt slightly smug about having achieved a satisfactory version of this ‘happy’ state. But right now, in my retirement life, there is very little in the way of smugness. Frankly my life is out of whack if you know what I mean.
There are two main reasons for this imbalance. First, as you will have read in these blogs there are the issues around my health. Most, like my prostate are working out OK, but the question of my colon and its possibly cancerous (I’m still waiting for the results) state is still with me.
It’s not so much the worrying although there’s some of that, but the numerous, time-consuming hospital visits and their energy-sapping effect on my well-being that takes its toll. This has impeded at least one of those three central pillars, namely writing this blog. This in two ways, one the aforementioned lack of energy and two, simply having less to write about. I’ve gone from writing, or at least posting, three weekly blogs and one podcast, to struggling to write just one a week – this one in fact.
The second retirement activity to take a hit has been my musical adventures. Instead of two competing musical genres – folk fiddle and jazz – I’m struggling to manage even one of this per week. Of course Covid didn’t help but that’s gone now, so that leaves me with simply a lack of motivation.
But, as well as this, there’s a simple lack of time. This brings me to my second reason for the retirement imbalance. That is the fact that the third pillar of my existence, namely our vineyard, has grown like Topsy. If you’ve read the blogs specifically about our vineyard you will realise this is a busy time of year.
In between growing and tending the grapes, picking them, transporting the picked fruit back to our garage in Leeds (where all our equipment resides) and now the task/s of actually making the stuff on account of none of our professional contacts wanting to do the job, well it’s at best engaging and at worst exhausting. Oh and one other related activity I’ve not mentioned, reading about how to make it.
Before we started on this stage of this activity (the making of it that is), I was comforted by the words of a chap who planted his vines at the same time as we did and who made his own wine, saying to me, it’s not rocket science, Peter. Well, he was right it isn’t, it’s far more complicated than that. Hence the reading, two separate books of varying accessibility and internet access (so many videos of making your own wine –all just a bit different) by both myself and Mrs Summerhouse. This, I repeat, with the inevitable, everybody has a different opinion about what to do, what’s important and in what order this is the case. Hey ho, it’s not been easy I can tell you.
A retirement out of balance summary
So there we are, that’s a brief summary of my retirement life at this point. I remember a definition of stress I liked to employ when I was a working psychologist, one I thought helped the people I was working with as well as my own self. It was, stress is that what happens when your day to day behaviour is out of line with your values, or something like that. How very true I thought then and still think today. I need to take action, watch this space to see how I deal with my current challenges. There’s a start, choosing your definition of the situation with care – challenges not problems.