A retirement blog about life sagas. Somebody once said nature abhors a vacuum. I don’t know what the original meant or what the context was, but I can easily transfer, what I understand to be the context, to my own retirement life. It means when you stop work and face the prospect of not having much to do, then all manner of stuff lines up to fill your life.
I’m currently thinking in terms of sagas. A bit like the Nordic ones of old but without the sex and pillage or indeed, as far as I know, any Vikings at all, but similar. I definitely know the guy in the picture from somewhere. My sagas fall mainly into four categories – the Facebook saga; the security camera saga; the saga of the wine-making and my health saga. They’ve all been active this last week or more accurately, inactive.
Take the Facebook saga – please. Every time I think the air waves have stilled, I get copied in to a series of emails between my FB ‘manager’ and my IT guy. They’ve taken to talking above my head and I’m quite happy to have it so, if only they’d sort it out. And every time I think it’s all gone quiet over there, up they pop. And so it was on Friday with talk of the blog auto-publishing or not, on Facebook. Apparently there is some disagreement between the two of them about whether it is or isn’t. Mother of Reilly will it never end? Good chaps both of them, let me make clear.
My other technical assistant, my dog-walking park friend, has been helping me with the saga of the security camera. A bit like the FB thing, I feel I was led to believe by well-meaning chums that my life would be significantly better if I just did x, y and another letter, I can’t remember, it’s so long ago. So what you need, he said, is a security camera. Fine, says I, you do it and send me the bill. The fact that neither of my chums charge me any money for their help, makes it more difficult for me to ‘manage’, if I may use that term.
That’s not quite the situation with the wine-making, but there’s a degree of me feeling it’s happening under sufferance and a large degree of me feeling that the process is a) protracted and b) out of my control. I have no doubt that all that’s currently going on in the wine world will form the basis of the next Vineyard blog, so I’ll say no more other than to say the wine-making and ‘distribution’ of the wine has more than filled that vacuum I spoke of, this last few days.
Which brings me to my health. I haven’t written about the on-going saga of my diabetes for a while. Until this Saturday there hasn’t been much happening from a medical point of view. On Saturday I had an appointment with my actual GP, a rare event, and one I wasn’t looking forward to at all. It was going to be about medication.
It’s been on my mind for the last few weeks and has doubtless added to my feeling of being somewhat burdened by retirement events. My worry was that, as my results, which had been good, have been less good recently, he would suggest my going back on insulin. There was no way this was going to happen. So I anticipated / feared he would suggest this and we would have a full and frank discussion as they say. He didn’t, just added one more tablet, but wants to review in October. Inevitably this saga will roll on until, well until the end of my retirement, but for today, better than I had expected.
Of course the other saga in my retirement life is my piano playing, as now is. You know the Viking boat at the back that rocks up playing a tune when all the violence is over and saying OK enough with the fighting, let’s party. The difference here is that this saga, unlike those above, is of my own volition. My choice. This doesn’t make it without stress of course but I could stop if I chose. I would feel cowardly but it could be done.
This coming Monday night, just to bring a different flavour to this particular saga, which is usually my jazz night, sees us take a break for the Easter holidays and I’m going to do something really wild, I’m going to attend a Celtic evening at a local pub. This might mean trying to play my guitar again arthritis and all. I don’t know and by the time I do know it will be too late to include in this blog. It’s not as if my musical life is not complicated enough but what the heck, always room for another complication. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I know I’m always, or so it seems writing about how busy our retirement lives are, but that seems to be the way of it. And yes, I know I also have written about needing to keep moving (like the shark) or I get bored. So all this said, the simple question is – is this sort of retirement, a hectic one, good for a person’s mental health or should we, in the words of Garrison Keiller, ‘kick back and lose a few responsibilities / obligations’.
You know I believe that Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that, ‘there is a douceur (sweetness) in having a long past behind you’. Whether that past is sweeter for having got full value from it, I’m not sure. Sometimes I think retirement should be full, but maybe I could do with a few less sagas. Even the Vikings got tired of all that action and settled down to the quiet life – a bit of fishing and farming, using the axe to make a nice table and chairs rather than burying it in some poor bugger’s head. And the morale is? Hmm, not sure but that’s my 1,000 words of this retirement blog.