Two year ago I wrote a retirement blog about the importance of the retired person continuing to be or becoming creative, I’d already written one on the same theme a year before that. In this latter blog I referenced David Byrne late of Talking Heads. I expressed some admiration for the variety of ways in which he expressed his creativity. I maybe even wondered at the time if I could possibly emulate him in my retirement, in a modest way of course. I’ve been successful in this ambition to some extent.
Here’s another retirement blog on the same topic. I’m going to make a connection to another musician this time around. I’ve never been a particular fan of Oasis so it’s perhaps a bit surprising that I should choose Noel Gallagher as my starting point on this occasion. Neither of my choices are retired of course but I think their thoughts have some relevance. And Noel most certainly does not have the flexibility that David Byrne had / has but in the interview that went along with his short concert that I’ve just watched on TV (Out of the now I think it was called), he said some things I liked or at least thought were interesting.
For example, although not strictly relevant to the topic of this retirement blog, when talking about the pandemic he said complete with much swearing of course – I only like 6 things and the pandemic took them all away – football, music, shopping, getting pissed, travel and my family. That’s all I have I don’t do anything else, I don’t have any hobbies. Then he said, I’m no fucking good at anything other than music. But he did say he thought he wrote good songs on account of his natural creativity (or words to that effect).
He also said interestingly, with reference to his own song-writing, that if you were a creative person then you had a duty to be creative. You owed it to people in these troubled times to make life better for them by creating, in his case, songs that gave them pleasure (or words to that effect).
Now this set me wondering. Do retired people have a particular duty to be creative? Is what I do with these retirement blogs a form of creativity? Do I make other retired people’s lives any better by publishing these blogs? Is being creative helpful both to the retired person him or herself and to others around them?
I know that generally if you consider retired people and their contribution to the less fortunate or society generally, you think in terms of charity work or giving to charity or looking after older or younger relatives. I suppose the easy answer to the first question above is if you apply your creativity to good causes- new ways of raising money or helping others then there would be no dispute. Retired people are clearly beneficial to others through their creative endeavours. Whether I’d go as far as to call it a duty, not sure.
But that’s not particularly me anyway, although I do like to think of myself as a charitable person I couldn’t honestly say my creativity flows in that direction. My creativity, as you will know if you’ve read these retirement blogs in the past, emerges mostly in the form of projects – barn, vineyard, cabin etc. And I couldn’t argue these projects have any benefit to anybody outside the immediate family. So no I can’t claim I’m helping in that way.
In fact I’m wondering if I don’t have too much creativity going on in this form. Perhaps it’s time I stopped having new ideas or projects and concentrated more on making the ones I do have actually work. Again not really my style, I’m a starter but not unfortunately, a finisher.
That said it’s clear any creativity I possess goes into these retirement blogs. I enjoy writing them and I like to think they are of some use / give a degree of pleasure to people who choose to read them. But, to repeat myself, as to whether I have a duty to write them as Noel Gallagher suggests we creative people do, that feels like a definite step too far. That is putting me on a higher moral plane than I deserve.
So that’s a positive response to probably three out of the four questions I posed above. No, yes, yes (hopefully) and yes. There is another positive I get from continuing to create these retirement blogs. It is the belief, and it’s a biggie, that if I’m still creating things that means I am still alive and metaphorically kicking. And that must be good for me and good for retired people generally.
Maybe my attitude is a bit reflected in a poem, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas. One that has become more and more relevant to my thinking in my old age.
Do not go gentle into that good night; Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
So would it be stretching the point too far to suggest that continuing to be creative is simply my version of raging against the ‘dying of the light’. How much you out there want to make that a guiding principle of your retirement /dare I say old age, I leave you to decide but for me it’s definitely important. Just so long as I don’t overdo it and cause myself unnecessary stress as I might have mentioned in recent blogs. I need to strike a balance.