Irritability : God’s gift to the retired person?

My last retired Thursday went something like this – the central heating at the cottage isn’t working properly and the plumber who fitted it is not answering my calls.* My phone that I took to the O2 guru to fix, a few days ago, now isn’t working again. The van that has spent a week and half in the garage and cost me nearly £500 to mend, has broken down again. I am well pissed off. Sense of humour, gone. I am irritable. These events led me to consider the following… Why can’t things that have broken and have been mended, stay mended? That’s the first question but the second bigger question, actually, no, the first question is big, maybe even bigger than the second question which is…

Do we get more irritable as we get older or do we become ‘more mellow’? If one of these why does this happen? To take the obvious one, for me at least, becoming more irritable. It feels a bit to me as if, and this may not surprise those who know me, I’m losing a certain, what shall I call it, elasticity. This rather nice word may be simply another word for resilience. I seem to be becoming less resilient in my retirement years. Little things seem to have the capacity to throw me off balance. Now I have a theory about this and I’ve written about it before in these blogs. It’s something like this… In my life retirement or otherwise, I try to remain fairly upright, I try to stay balanced. Inevitably some little event comes along and knocks me slightly off-balance or out of shape if you want to mix metaphors. If nothing else happens gradually my equilibrium will be restored. If another negative life event comes along then obviously I lean a little further. The point is that the further I lean the more off-balance I am and the easier it is to knock me further off-balance with comparatively minor set-backs. I’m now  positively leaning,  which eventually, with a few more minor knocks, means you fall over becoming an hysterical heap rather than the  solid, in-control, upright citizen to which I aspire and may once have been. So far, clear enough and clearly the ‘more-mellow’ option isn’t even in the picture.

The question for this blog, given it’s about retirement, is does this loss of elasticity happen more to us because we are retired? Well, I hate to be repetitive, but… It seems to me that it’s that old cabbage, self-esteem or lack of it that sometimes seems to go hand in glove with retirement. I have written several times in these blogs about this, about how retirement can (I only say can) lower our self-esteem. If this is true then our confidence, well-being, our general feeling of being OK with the world will likely take a dip. If this is our default position then I think it follows that, as we get older, we do lose a little of the elasticity of our younger days.

OK, you’re saying, but so what? We all know about the grumpy old man / woman scenario so beloved of recent programmes on our TV screens. It’s nothing new. I could say, well it is to me and, end the blog right here …..

Only kidding, I can’t possibly end the blog, with me as an ex-psychologist and all, without some insightful advice, without offering some coping skills. And saying it’s nothing new would be a blatant lie anyway. Only one problem, any advice I give, it must be admitted that I don’t apply this advice to my own natural inclination for negative thinking. Still, how many of these self-help gurus we read about, who are making millions out of dispensing advice to others, do we think actually take or live by their own bulked-out homilies? Yes, right, not many. So why should I, who seeks not to make any money from his advice giving, be worried about how wonderful my advice might be. Yes, this drivel is completely free. So here comes some advice.

1. Focus on the positive. Make yourself reflect on all the vans you own that haven’t broken down – yet.
2. Take pleasure in your misfortunes, find the humour.  If life gives you lemons, etc.  Too banal, I prefer, when the O2 guru can’t fix your phone even though he says he has, laugh with him while you tell him he is an inept prat.
3. Interact with your AA man in a positive manner. Tell yourself that this breakdown (the second one) is yet another opportunity to meet somebody new. Tell him a joke – did you hear the one about the AA man who got there early? No nor did I. How we chortled.
4. Enjoy your irritability, make it your friend and make it your own unique irritability. Be proud.
5. Go a bit further and welcome the disaster as character building. Yes, we are back to the what don’t kill you makes you stronger, line and yes, even revisited, it’s bollocks.
6. Smile when you take your van back to the garage who apparently didn’t fix it in the first place and enjoy putting the thought in his tiny head about how nicely the garage would burn with all that oil and petrol around if somebody were stupid enough to drop a match through the letter box. You know, as my grandma used to say, misery loves company.
7. Be humble, you know, there but for the grace of God – garage man, O2 guru, AA man and plumber – go I, after all even you make mistakes sometimes. Give them all a hug and say I understand and if you can give them a knee in the knackers at the same time, well, so much the better.

*PS the plumber, when I finally got to speak to him, had just come out of hospital after a hernia operation, so, yes, be humble, that could be you and at your age, most probably soon will be, then you’ll have something to be grumpy about.

I’m afraid this blog has rather gone off-message, the perils of not having any clear idea what the blog is going to be about other than the vaguest notion that you’re going to have yet another whinge about being retired. Taking my own advice, the real plus about retirement is the extra time it gives you to really fully contemplate all this life stuff. Finally, tease it all apart, take the piss and get on with enjoying your retirement.