Do retired people even set New Year resolutions? Do they set targets, make goals or identify / clarify their ambitions for the coming year? I only ask because, as I’ve written before, as a working person I was the all-time great goal setter at the beginning of each year and at points along the way.
I could guarantee that, back then, the first entry in my new diary (which I’m looking at as I write this) would be my goals (as I used to call them) for the year. And now there are none. I’m not sure what to make of this absence. Does it mean I am no longer driven by foolish ambition (and isn’t all ambition ultimately foolish?) or, less gloriously, that I have become uncaring. I’ll come back to this question.
Do I care what I look like when I go out, whether I have food down my cardigan (not that I wear cardigans, the cardigan is a metaphor)? Are my flies undone and yes, I do wear trousers, so far at least. Am I merely hiding behind retirement as an excuse for inertia? Or am I, in truth, the same driven human being I’ve always been and trying to kid myself that I’ve somehow grown out of the foolishness of always looking to the future, or the greener grass on the other side of the fence, for happiness?
In part, I have to say, that a lack of ambition is connected to the fact that I’m quite happy with what I have got, the vineyard, the jazz, the blog etc. etc. I say this with some confidence because, when I played that old game of ‘if you only have six months to live what do you want to do with that time?’ or the old ‘what’s on my bucket list’ quiz, I drew a blank.
Much to my surprise I found myself answering, well, very little actually. Not like me at all, I’ve definitely always been a Mr Grass is greener man. What is happening to me? I must try harder to find something I want to do. I even seem to have given up, or relegated to unimportance, my favourite retirement conundrum, ‘the missing link’. And that has been a constant companion for me in these blogs. What a puzzle.
My daughter and her husband had a version of setting resolutions that might possibly solve the puzzle. Their self-inquisition was to identify – one thing (in their lives) they wanted to do more of, one thing to do less of and one thing to keep the same. It’s a suitably modest task I think.
Certainly Mrs Summerhouse rose to the challenge. She wanted to do more art (see Friday blog) and yoga, to worry less (good luck with that one) and the rest can stay the same. So how hard could this be for me? With a real struggle, leaving aside any long distance travel which as I said in the last blog, appeals less as I get older and the thought of putting the dogs in kennels has no appeal at all, I thought we might resurrect an early retirement goal.
This was to travel by train to various places in the UK to visit interesting churches and cathedrals. Right now with rising fares, strikes and passenger protests this doesn’t seem like the brightest idea, but it is an idea. Back when we first got the pups, we made a tentative start but then Archie decided he didn’t much care for trains particularly when they went through tunnels and over points. Obviously the answer was to find journeys where there were no tunnels (relatively easy) and no points (just about impossible).
If we break down this goal into smaller steps (something I was always preaching to my clients when I worked) it ought to be possible to resurrect this goal. We shall see. I said I’m happy with the other retirement areas I’ve put in place, true I’d like to get better / be more successful with the vineyard, the music and this blog, but I am not inclined to define any of these as goals or things to ‘do more of’. So trains and churches it is.
True I’d like to keep healthy but that would of course be a foolish ambition beyond continuing to exercise and eat and drink in a sensible fashion. Yes, I can control (that word again) these outcomes to a degree but as we know good health is still largely beyond our own control, as I found out last year.
What do I want to do less of? Yes, worrying less would be nice but I really don’t know how this can be achieved. I can read ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ a hundred times and yet still wake up in the middle of the night worrying about, at one end of the continuum, the health of myself and loved ones or the state of the world and at the other end of the worry continuum, did we put the dogs in their cage, why can’t I put my socks on or how about this for a corker, who wrote The 39 Steps? This is true. This in the middle of the night when I am undoubtedly at my finest worry-wise.
In the morning, we were walking the dogs having one of our deep and meaningful talks, usually about what’s for breakfast, when the topic of my new diary cropped up. I told Mrs Summerhouse I had filled in the first page of my new diary and I had to say it looked a little blank. I said it’s what you might call neutral in the goal-setting department.
But here is the puzzling thing, as I look forward to yet another new year, I couldn’t for the life of me decide whether ‘neutral’ is a good or a bad thing for the retired person. Again with this confusion. Does it mean I’m happy with what I’ve constructed for my retirement life or that I’m getting lazy? It seems like a very fine line between the two. But maybe that’s just me, is it?
Congratulations on being happy with your life in retirement. As I am, so I see no need for goals, but then I never have: if it’s something I want to do, then I just do it, and have all my life.
I hope your diary is a paper one, as so many of my associates, not all of then as old (75) as me, don’t turn up to things because they keep their diary on their phone, even knowing it will let them down! Now I’ve noted that often people say their paper diary.
Yes not like me to use the happy word, it’s taken a while! Yes it’s paper. Not infallible but generally comforting