Retirement blog about feeling pissed off and taking some actions

I’ve kept these blogs fairly upbeat over the last few weeks with all the challenges that lockdown has brought. I thought it would be the way to go both for my sake and the sake of my readers. And then strangely somewhat out of the blue, last week I realised I was somewhat pissed off and felt a bit trapped. Kinda came over me, like these things do, I suppose.

I’m not going to use the D word because I think it is over-used and abused sometimes for not good reasons. But as I say I’m not going there. What I will do is tell you what I did to counteract my feeling of pissed off-ness and a sense of being a bit trapped.

I turned to a paradigm of psychology that I’ve written about many times in these blogs. But no apologies for that, I think it’s that good. Incidentally, had I been called upon in my country’s hour of need, it’s the approach to counselling I would have used with any ‘clients’. So Solutions Focused Therapy (SFT) it is, again.

I started by taking the main areas of my life under lockdown. In my case these were 1) my health, 2) this blog, 3) my music and 4) the vineyard. There are other bits and pieces that have crept in like the DIY and gardening of late. In fact, in their cases, more like barged in shouting look at me, look at me. But I think these are exceptions for exceptional circumstances. So I’ll stick with the four.

Already taking a bit of a grip on my life by categorising (teasing apart the grey mass) it makes me feel a bit more in control. A continuing theme in these retirement blogs and in my retirement generally. I’ll return to this theme in a moment.

The next step was to rank each of the four areas on a scale of 1 to 10 for satisfaction levels at this point in time. You pretty much have to take the first number that comes into your head if this method is going to work. Otherwise you start to procrastinate. And, as we have been told, procrastination is the thief of time. And it’s also quite hard to spell.

My rankings went as follows (and I’ll explain what I think was the reasoning behind these scores in a moment) – health 4; this blog 6; music 3 and vineyard 5. So some pretty low scores. What a ‘counsellor’ might do next is to ask the ‘client’ to consider what makes the scores what they are, in other words, why isn’t it a 0? Within this score are the possible germs of a way forward. The positives that we can build on.

Being a miserable bastard I skipped this step and went to the next popular strategy in this paradigm (nice word) – what would it take to move this score forward one point? I’ll do this in a sec but first, as promised, just for your information, I’ll explain, if I can, my scores. Not always easy to do and, in the context of SFT, not at all necessary. But as I say, for your, in the words of Leonard what’s his name, compere at Leeds City Varieties in the very old ‘good old days’, your delight and delectation, are my rationales.

Health? Well it’s usually a bit ropey and I’ve been struggling with my weight and a bit with my sugar levels in lockdown. On account, perhaps, of the more frequent treats we’ve been allowing ourselves these last few weeks. The DIY has made my arthritis worse, pains in feet and most other places and that continual nagging doubt of, is this a virus symptom (sore throat, cough etc.)? Anyway add into that mess the usual diabetes bits and bobs. And, as a bonus, the news that one in four people who died from the virus had diabetes, then oh, happy days. So hence the score.

This blog? Well simple, I had been on page 1 of Google, admittedly with no idea why and then I dropped to page 3. I never had that much interest in Google rankings if I had there’s a lot more I could have done – been careful with my SEOs, key words repeated, adverts allowed, links to other sites, etc. – to promote it. But now I’m obsessed with my rankings. Not quite, but the germ is there.

Music? Simple again, with being at the vineyard and the DIY and the lockdown, I haven’t really done any. I’ve missed the Thursday night fiddle group on Zoom for two consecutive weeks. I feel guilty about this probably with no good reason. Nor have I played any at home in the way that I boasted about in a recent blog.

Finally, the vineyard. We haven’t been there for nearly 8 weeks on account of the lockdown. Last week we made it. The main problem was that there were very few buds even though it’s two weeks later than the time they arrived last year. There’s a whole lot more going off vineyard-wise and this will probably be my next blog but for the purpose of this one, suffice it to say there are challenges to be met.

So that’s my explanation for the scores. The most important step however is now to ask the question, what would improve the rankings of each area by one point? In brief, as I’m nearing my 1,000 word limit, here are my one point forward strategies. You have to bear in mind that some issues are hard to control. In which case I suggest it is better to do something even if it does not seem directly relevant to the problem. I know this sounds odd but my thinking is it’s better to take action even if it turns out to be the wrong one. Remember, control what you can.

So 1) health, my one pointer was simply continue to take the virus seriously because I’d been getting a bit slack. 2) This blog, continue to write three blogs a week when I had been thinking about cutting back to two. 3) My music, get up into the attic this weekend and have a go on all of my instruments. 4) The vineyard, put up rabbit netting to control those pesky wabbits. As I say I’ll probably write a full blog about this maybe Friday.

So there we are. Believe it or not, analysing my reasons for feeling pissed off and taking a small action / solution in each area, made me feel a whole lot better about things. I don’t know about you but sometimes it doesn’t take much to get me heading back towards a 7 (my life target score).