I have been racking my brains trying to remember if I’ve ever done this before. I’m usually pretty good with things that are far enough back in time, as I believe this is. It’s recent happenings I have trouble with. Like what time is it when I looked at my watch just a few seconds ago but have to look again because I’ve forgotten what it said, or what was that song called, the one we heard in the pub less than an hour ago and said we really liked. Both of which happened last Friday. But this memory was way back.
This particular intellectual challenge was prompted by an article in The Observer colour supplement. Where would I be writing this blog if I didn’t get the ideas from the weekend papers? And this the day after we made good our threat to stop taking The Guardian on the grounds that we did not fit into their demographic. Yesterday (Saturday) we, for the first time in many, many years, deliberately did not buy The Guardian. We bought The Yorkshire Post instead. Now we have bought the Post before but only as a supplement to our main purchase – the above.
I have to say, as a stand-alone paper, it was a disappointment. Now is not the time for a full examination as to why this was the case but (you wouldn’t want me to ramble would you?), suffice it to say, it all felt a bit shallow. So back to The Observer today and the article in question. By now you may be wondering what the topic of the article was and what its relevance to a blog on retirement might be. Then again you might not give a toss. I’ll tell you anyway.
The article broadly speaking was written by one of their journalists who was planning ‘getting her life back on track’ by consulting two types of life coaches, I think she called them. In my darkest moments when my retirement seems particularly pointless, as opposed to moderately so, I have thought about seeking some kind of life-coaching. You know, like you do when the missing link to which I have referred many times in these pages, remains, well, missing.
My well-honed inertia always means that it doesn’t happen but it’s there lurking. Lurking enough to make me read the article when I might have passed over it with a look of scorn and / or derision. And that’s where this distant memory nearly came back to me. The ‘it’ was a technique, if I have understood correctly, where you use cuttings (your own) from magazines to help you clarify your ‘ideal lifestyle’ or, more prosaically, your future goals. You look through the magazines and cut out and stick on a collage anything that rings a bell, strikes a chord etc in this regard. I think the idea is that the technique will ‘uncover’ subconscious desires about what you really want from life, desires that remain inaccessible to more logical ways of thinking.
As an example a logical question might be, what do I really want from my retirement? To which the answer, for me at least, has been, buggered if I know. Before even attempting this technique I was trying to remember if I’d ever used anything similar in my work as an educational psychologist. Not impossible that I should have, but if I had I couldn’t bring it to mind.
In fact the only example of such use in our lives was when you cut out pictures, bits of fabric, wallpaper, colour swatches etc from magazines to help you choose your decorative house / room scheme. Our modern day version of this is to buy something we like the look of and when we get it home ask, where the hell are we going to put this? Eclecticism we call it. Hmm, might look nice there. Put it there and we’ll live with it, see if we like it. Ten years later, well you get the idea.
So I gave up trying to pass judgement on this technique and began to vaguely wonder a) if it might help me form a few unpredicted goals (bearing in mind I haven’t really come up with any goals for this year) and b) failing that, it might spark a blog, such as this one you’re reading or are about to stop reading, on the grounds that it has absolutely no substance whatsoever.
I did go so far as to speculate about the type of magazine I might use. And at this point the mists of time cleared just a little to enable me to remember I had used it and had thought a newspaper would be the best medium for the task. So then I would recreate the exercise and read through the paper and tear out any headline or sub-heading (annoying if Mrs Summerhouse hasn’t read the paper) that sparked of a clearer view my retirement or, as it said in the article, ‘finding pictures and words that resonate with my dream life, my future goals’.
I wasn’t optimistic about this exercise but, for the sake of research, I thought I would give it a go. Reading through the main paper was an entirely depressing affair. Bloody hell these are dire times. However, I persevered and this is what I came up with, the actual headings – ‘reboot your life’; ‘solo to the south pole’; ‘classical music sales rise by 10%’; ‘seeking solace in nature healed this troubled soul’; ‘Leonardo was a man of the Renaissance’. And that was about it. A bit thin. True I might have got more if I’d trawled through the rest of the paper but I thought I’d better try make sense of what I’d got, modest though it may be.
So how might the above list ‘resonate with my dream (retirement – my brackets) life, my future goals’? I got as far as the following, then thankfully I’d reached my 1000 approx. limit because it was hard. So, from the above – retirement is a chance to do something new. To travel to new places. People like classical music and so do I and that’s a sign of a positive culture (a slightly weird one this). To get out and about in the woods / countryside and help one’s sense of well-being and Leonardo always a hero of mine was a man who had a number of different skill areas (dabbled in different things in my terms). So do different things.
Hmm, nothing revolutionary there, more confirmation of what I already think is important in my retirement. But all I can say is try something similar yourself (maybe choose your source carefully) if you think you need help in making sense of your retirement ambitions, even if you don’t know what they are. Tricky business this retirement. I don’t think I’m any closer to being able to define a ‘dream’ retirement.