Retirement blog : a short Friday blog about an experiment in positive reframing

Mrs Summerhouse and I have often debated, as we contemplate our golden future together, what’s best for us. I mean this in terms of our joint mental and physical health.

The debate about our health, mental and physical, has centred around that old question – is it better that we both go bonkers / senile together and similar for our general health. Should we be equally infirm, you know in our wheelchairs together? Or the alternative scenario – one of us stays fit and mentally alert (looking after the unlucky one?) while s/he slips into the abyss?

A cheerful question, I think you will agree, as I sit contemplating the dark, rainy day outside the window. A day which suits both our ‘states’ quite well. You see we’re both under the weather and as I say, given the weather is shite, there’s not much room for us underneath it.

However, chin up, as an ex-psychologist I have long espoused the benefits of something called positive-reframing. Simply put this means taking the bad and finding the good in it. Or using the bad experience to lead us to better place in our retirement. Something like that (see vagueness later in this blog).

In this case, as I say, we’re both not well. Mrs SH has some kind of chest infection which keeps her (and me) awake. She sounds like a mini Vesuvius erupting. Not nice. The steroids seem a) not to have cleared this up and b) led to a whole new set of symptoms (as a bonus). She is threatening to cancel her yoga class tonight. If she does I will know she is truly unwell because this is a very rare event indeed.**

I, on the other hand, have fallen over (how old is that) on uneven paving and, in trying not to fall on the dogs who I had on their leads in front of me, contrived to fall in such a way that I trapped my hand underneath me and have bruised my ribs.

If you’ve ever bruised your own ribs you will know what a debilitating, all-encompassing pain in the ribs this is. You can’t walk, sit, breath certainly not laugh (not that I’m much inclined at the moment) or sneeze or cough, getting out of bed or finding a position to sleep in is a massive operation, and I’ll leave it there. It really hurts and in lots of different ways.

In addition, Mrs SH now seems to have passed some of her ailments on to moi, as if I didn’t have enough of my own. A bit like the cartoon above but not quite. You will be asking how is this a positive reframing exercise? The answer is we decided we could see our current state as an experiment which would go some way to answering the questions posed at the beginning of this blog. Better together or better different?

For once the answer to a potentially difficult question seems quite clear. One of us needs to be fit and well both mentally and physically although it may be not the same person for both. Yes, I know this means we think we have a choice in the matter. Anyway, how can I be so sure? Well this current period is a rare experimental opportunity mainly because Mrs SH is rarely ill although I have to say she is getting a little vague as she takes on board the challenges of her 70s.

It’s possible I’m a little less vague although, I have to admit, this may be an overly-optimistic view given I am not sure about this assessment. Sorry if that sounds vague. So yes, she’s ill and as well as being in pain, she is a pain. Maybe it’s because she is rarely ill that she doesn’t cope well when she is. This despite me helpfully pointing out – welcome to my world. This on account of me always having some pain or other. But I don’t like to talk about it.

Hopefully by the time I post this blog on Friday one of us will be a little less in pain but if not we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that we have laid to rest one of the great conundrums of retirement. If you can’t both age gracefully then, for us, it will be best if one of us does.

* I really am going to write a retirement blog shortly about my physical health because there’s been a lot going off. But that’s for later.

**She has cancelled which means I might have to start being more sympathetic.