Wasn’t there a book a while ago titled something like, ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’? Apart from one or two caveats you’d have to admit, as a retirement blog / life mantra, nothing could be more sensible. One obvious qualifier is when does a small bit of stuff transfigure into a bloody big bit actually? Another slight qualification to this excellent advice is just how many ‘small stuffs’ can a retired person avoid sweating about when they happen at the same time?
I only ask because, and not for the first time in my retirement, I find myself struggling to cope with this ‘small stuff’. In my lecturing to teacher’s days about how naughty children pulled you out of shape, I used to draw the analogy of how the little things piled up and pushed you off-balance. A bit at a time, almost unnoticeably, until you are leaning over so far it takes only the merest bit of wind to knock you completely off balance, flat on your face in the dirt in fact.
I only mention this because a light breeze gently brushed my emotional well-being on Monday morning as we left the house to take the dogs for their first walk. Now I know this is going to sound completely ridiculous but here goes. One of neighbours was out in the street just starting on a walk with his dog, who was lying flat on the pavement refusing to move, or so it seemed. I made some jovial remark which he totally ignored, and me, and began chatting happily with Mrs Summerhouse, who was directly behind me. I walked on.
It was only after I’d been walking for a few minutes when the unfairness of this struck me. In fact it bloody irritated me, despite all Mrs SH’s perfectly plausible explanations about what might have happened. I was in no mood for her positive slant on life. This was simply another of those dents (theme of an earlier blog some while ago on a similar theme) that life gives out usually when you’re not expecting them.
Madness you say, it was nothing at all. Well, true but the point is that I’ve been feeling so far off balance lately that it took very little of life’s more irritating side to topple me to the pavement – metaphorically speaking of course. The irritating side of life has been much in evidence these last few days.*
Maybe it started (do these things have a starting point?) with the drive to the barn / vineyard on Friday. The Land Rover broke down. It ended up on the back of a tow truck and we ended up spending several hours waiting for first the AA man and then the tow truck. The nature of its ailment has, at the time of writing, yet to be determined. It could be a small stuff or it could be a bloody big bill.
We drove up next morning in the small car. True that didn’t, ne marche pas, as the French say, the previous week but that, when the AA man arrived, turned out to be a genuinely and literally small thing – the fuel pump fuse as above. Now that was a small thing and I was easily able to not sweat it, but this was an altogether bigger small thing and maybe not small at all.
While we were up at the barn we took the dogs for their early morning walk and, as luck would have it, bumped into another small thing in the shape of one of the people from the village. Without preamble he said, I tried your wine (the free stuff we donated to charity and the local pub) – quite nice, he said. Quite nice, I thought but said nowt, is that the best you can bloody well do? Well don’t knock yourself out being positive. Let me knock you out instead, I thought. Hmm.
Anyway onward, weaving our way through life’s rich tapestry of events. We decided to head back to Leeds on the Sunday having gifted our wine to our local gamekeeper and, through him, to the Lord (yes you read that right) who owns the estate nearby. Too complicated a story for this blog. But the simple fact was this is why we had driven up to the barn in order to give Nick (the gamekeeper) three bottles of wine with which he hopes to impress his boss. But, as I say that’s another story. Point is I was trying to be helpful and the car broke down. Hmm, again.
So we packed up (although not as completely as we thought) and drove back to Leeds. On arrival I discovered I had, I hoped (as the lesser of several evils) left my bag with my phone, credit cards, etc., back at the barn. So Mrs SH offered to drive back and bring them home. An hour there and an hour back. In the meantime, I would walk the dogs in another of our local parks. Were they grateful? No they bloody well were not. They refused to walk and went back to the van (we were getting low on vehicles by this time, Land Rover in garage and Mr SH in Kia). I tried to call their bluff by walking on my own. Which is what I did, for about forty minutes. They showed no sign of joining me and in the end I was forced to concede defeat. Out-witted by two collies.
To continue the canine theme, I met my dog-walking chum in the park Monday morning and started to share my small stuff with him. He listened for a while and then said something that surprised me. He said, what you need is hypnosis. I had not expected this, he doesn’t seem like a hypnosis kind of guy. Your head’s too full of stuff that’s why you forget things, he said. Yes, he had had hypnosis because, as he explained it, when, he was driving, found he was afraid to go faster than 30 mph and, after hypnosis, he found he was driving at 80 mph. Not sure I took this as a recommendation but I’m sure he meant well. I think his point might have been you’ve got too much going on and that’s why life is giving you a few lemons which you are incapable of making lemonade from.
Anyway I digress, here’s the thing. Does being a) retired and b) old, mean that your default setting is to be, before life even takes a hand, off-balance? Not only leaning with whatever your chosen or unchosen physical ailment/s might be but also psychologically pre-disposed to start the game (of life, of retirement) 1 – 0 down even before kick-off? Not sure, you tell me.
I read a nice quote in the weekend papers, in a poetry book review of all things (I might be temperamentally disposed to be off-balance but I’m not disposed towards poetry, however, Robert Frost wrote, poetry is a ‘momentary stay against confusion’. Much nicer, I think, than the sweating that goes with the small stuff. Bring on the poetry, maybe. I just think that what we need is a holiday and, as luck would have it, vehicle permitting, that’s where we’re off this very day. Stay reading this retirement blog for reports of our progress. Next blog from Ireland abw.
*Don’t even get me started on trying to buy a sat nav with Irish post codes on it from Halfords. Three hours of my life gone and never coming back.
I pass on what my daughter tells me in similar circumstances: you have too much time on your hands in retirement, so too often over-think things that don’t matter, that you wouldn’t have before retirement.
I think there’s some truth in this altho it never feels we have much time on our hands