Retirement blog about the goal for 2020 that doesn’t exist

I wrote recently in this retirement blog about not having any goals for 2020. I wrote that I’d tried the ‘want to do more of / less of’ thing, or bucket lists or the ‘6 months to live’ prompt. All to try and stimulate any ideas for targets to set / goals to seek in 2020. And the result was me, of all people, stating that I was pretty happy with what I’d got lined up.

Remarkable I thought at the time. Me, the great grass is greener man, content with what I’d got or at least what I was planning. It didn’t seem right at the time and then I had an idea. I can’t remember whether it was on one of our dog walks or in the middle of the night because I couldn’t remember the idea at all.

Until it came back to me, out of the blue you might say. The fact that it hadn’t occurred to me as a kind of goal before the idea which I forgot anyway, doesn’t speak much of it as a powerful driver of my retirement behaviour. And yet it has been with me a long time.

In one way it’s been around since 1979. This was the year we spent on exchange in the USA and the year we drove across America in our Transam (a muscle car in case you didn’t know). On the way through Colorado we ended up in a town called Durango in the South West of the state. We nearly drove straight through. As with many American towns the main highway was an uninspiring mess of motels, gas stations, drive-in restaurants and so on.

For some small reason we decided not to give up on the town just yet and turned off the main highway on to the actual Main Street. To cut a long story short we discovered a fairly genuine cowboy town. Or at least what looked like one to our British eyes. We loved it  and spent the night in a proper cowboy hotel called The Strater. There began a relationship that has stretched through the 40 plus years.

On a subsequent trip we explored the surrounding area and ended up at a lake, name of Vallecito. At least we were told it was a lake and believed it was even though it was frozen flat and covered in snow. The lake was surrounded by mountains also covered in snow. We fell in love with the peace and tranquillity of this area. Suffice it to say peace and tranquillity are not my usual companions in life. If I could I wanted to hang on to them.

Which is why an early development in this relationship was the buying of three acres of forest 7,000 feet up in the Rockies. About 14 miles outside of Durango. The land was ridiculously cheap by British standards and a cheap way of buying  the elusive qualities of, yes, you’ve guessed it, peace and tranquillity. One day I told myself I will build my own small cabin on this piece of heaven.

And that’s where I’m at 40 plus years later. I’m usually pretty good at setting goals and achieving them but not this one. To the point that I’ve stopped putting it on my list on the first page of my diary. It was there for many years. Every now and again there would be a little flutter of activity but basically other than paying resident’s association fees and taxes, nothing happened.

So now not only is it not on my list which doesn’t exist anyway but I don’t even remember that I haven’t put it on the non-existent list. Even when prompted by various goal-setting exercises as above. It’s a bit sad.

But now I’ve remembered it and now I’ve started remembering the odd initiatives I’ve taken to try and get this long-lasting project off the ground. It was only a month or so ago that the Log Cabin Building Association emailed me with an offer (just less than $1,000) to take part in an on-line cabin building course.

This was the same one I thought briefly about signing my son-in-law up for until Mrs Summerhouse sensibly kyboshed the idea. Thing is the goal has not gone away it’s just buried under a blanket of day to day more practical activities. But if it can’t even make it on to the wistful ‘things to do more of’ list, you might argue there’s not a lot of hope for it.

As is always the case with me and goal-setting and the advice I have frequently given to others, it’s just a matter of breaking it down into small enough steps (I’m good at buying books on the topic as in photo above) that the overall goal is not ‘out-facing’. I thought I had it with the on-line course, especially if I’m prepared to potentially waste $1,000. And if you’ve read these blogs before you will know I’m not above such foolishness. And yet I haven’t done it, not this time around anyway.

So what do I do? I’ve already written in this retirement blog that I’m fairly happy with what I’ve put in place for my retirement years. Do I really want to over-complicate my retirement with difficult-to-achieve goals? I don’t know I do know it’s an itch that refuses to go away. Hence my surprise when on the walk / in the middle of the night wherever I realised it hadn’t made it on to goals for 2020 list. Sometimes I surprise myself and the older I get and the deeper into my retirement the more different ways I find of surprising myself.

As I often write in these blogs, damned if I can work out whether this is a good thing or not. What I do think is that writing these blogs continue to be a form of therapy. The itch doesn’t go away completely but writing a retirement blog like this does reduce the itching for a while. And that might be all that I can hope for.