Changing times. I thought I would take a break from the health side of my retirement and remind myself of the other, brighter sides of my existence. And, as is usually the case, these other activities ebb and flow week by week and there have been some changes as the title of this blog implies.
There’s no doubt that the main focus of the moment (aside from my health) is on our vineyard and our grapes. They’re close to being ready to pick and hence – hopefully – make wine, but I will write about this side of our lives as a vineyard blog in the next few days.
This leaves the music and this blog. I’ll take the last one first partly because it’s the easiest to write about and this on account of the fact that I’m writing considerably fewer. This change in my writing habits was prompted by my Covid bout. During this period I could not bring myself to even think about blogs let alone write them. In crude terms I just could not be arsed.
Now, for better or worse, this state of affairs has continued. Take the worse side of things. Writing fewer blogs (sometimes I was writing 3 a week including a retro blog, i.e. one written a while ago and resurrected because it seemed relevant to today) and a podcast (which nobody seemed to listen to and for which I was paying a monthly fee) and all in all I felt stressed by this, admittedly chosen by me, retirement activity.
So I found out, quite accidentally, that perhaps (never say never etc.) I was better off just writing one blog a week and furthermore not obsessing about putting this out first thing Tuesday morning. So there we are, the only problem, after nine years and well over 1,000 blog written in this way, there’s a degree of guilt associated with a reduction in my stress levels. Truth is I don’t cope well with change even if it is clearly for the better. Hey ho.
Which leaves my musical activities. These also took a beating during my Covid time. So not having played any kind of music for several weeks it was amazingly hard to get back into the routine of playing either acoustic guitar at Folk Fiddle or electric guitar during jazz sessions. Since I started back I have played two folk fiddle sessions and one jazz session. To say I was rusty would do a disservice to the word, oh and I was nervous as well.
Given the length of the break in these musical sessions I suppose I could have used this as a prompt to cutting down or even stopping altogether. But then I remembered my planning for a well-balanced retirement all those (9) years ago and rather than a slight modification to my life style it was beginning to feel like a complete tearing up of my thoughtfully constructed retirement life / identity. Which may be a good idea but the questions looms large, yes, but what do I put in its place. What would my identity be then?
And bear in mind that from those very first weeks I have continually written that the key to a successful retirement is to make sure you have an alternative identity to that which your job gave you. Giving up too much was beginning to feel like losing my retirement identity altogether.
Changing Times summary
So in the nick of time I pulled into play another of my key retirement (and before retirement) values, that of balance as hinted at above. For some reason the phrase, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, stupid though it sounds comes to mind. In other words let’s not go crazy with giving up my established retirement activities, just some modest adjustments to my retirement life seems to be the way to go. Again, watch this space.