What is the ideal excitement level for the retired person? I suggest you don’t want it too exciting because then you might find it hard to relax and as we know we retired people do like to relax. Too much stress may have the effect of shortening our retirement lives. Just saying.
On the other hand we don’t want our retirement lives dull and uneventful because that way we might feel we’re just turning the pages until we, well die, I guess. Just going through the motions until the Grim Reaper pops by.
Sometimes we have a choice, we can organise our lives in such a way as to achieve the desired balance. I have to say, in my case, despite my on-going efforts to keep control of life events, the whole thing can feel very wobbly and uncontrolled.
Take Thursday morning last week, for example. I start the day trying to monitor my vital signs – blood, weight and blog rating. Sometimes these figures are so bad as to be laughable. On this particular morning my blood sugar was ridiculously high. The only problem with having two alcohol free days is that on the third day (Wednesday) I go berserk. Well relatively berserk compared with Monday and Tuesday. Such was last Wednesday. My excitement at the prospect of having a beer and then a glass of white wine and red with the meal, was as high as my blood levels.
The fact that I’d been trying to do some DIY out in the garden and it was a hot day, didn’t help. I felt I had deserved to drink. Not sure where that comes in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs but last Wednesday I definitely needed a drink, several drinks in fact.
I had been trying to modify the garden gate that was one of my projects last but one lockdown. I was quite pleased at the time with my efforts. Particularly because I made it out of recycled materials but there is a downside. As you may know recycling is all very well, but you’re using bits that were never meant to be used for this purpose and they don’t quite fit.
I thought I’d pretty much got these bits fit for purpose with a good deal of hammering, screwing, sawing and planning and such like. It looked pretty good to begin with but gradually over the months the desirable rectangular shape turned into a rhomboid or trapezium (I forget which) shape. It became more and more pronounced until last Wednesday I could stand it no longer.
Imagine my excitement at finally taking the bloody gate off its hinges, tugging and pulling it back to a rectangular shape and then screwing (with many, many screws, more screws than wood it seemed) it back together again. Very exciting wondering just how much better it would look when I re-hung it.
Result? After more than two hours of struggle it didn’t look any bloody better and it still was un-rectangular. How I laughed. So nothing else for it but to drink which is what I did.
And the gate was not done with me at the end of the day. I spent what seemed to be the whole of Wednesday night / Thursday morning, dreaming of putting screws and brackets on the bloody gate, round and round in my brain, then to wake up exhausted and wondering what the day’s data held for me. Very exciting, in a way.
As I say the blood sugar was bad, the weight was similarly disappointing and my retirement blog rating on Google, indifferent I guess you could call it. The first two possibly connected to the amount of alcohol consumed the day before, the last one just the result of trying to lead an exciting life by being a blog writer.
Time that morning to take stock of the broader horizons of the world as a whole. I turn on my phone, I don’t even get to the news, and the first thing that pops up is a Facebook message from the Tween Lakes residents group. In the form of a forest fire warning. I have periodically been very excited at the prospect of finally building my Colorado cabin. If it were now built I would be even more excited right now by the possibility of it being burnt down.
This cabin might well be one example of an exciting project which may cause more stress than excitement on the scale. Right now rather too much excitement. Maybe I need to rethink the role of this particular project in my life.
So, finally, in answer to the question in the title of this retirement blog, all I can say is, find ways of adding to or subtracting retirement activities as the excitement level rises above or falls below your perceived ideal. I say ‘perceived’ because of course there is no accurate measure of that ideal, just a feeling.
So you might have your list of your existing activities which generate excitement (as the best emotion, stress as the worst) – vineyard, barn, cabin, podcast, retirement blog, musical activities, that kind of thing in my case. All of these, theoretically at least, I can reduce or increase depending on my excitement needs.
I might even have an auxiliary list that are activities that can be added to the above – hotel stays, trips, build another shed or similar, attending learning courses, more DIY (ha), music concerts (playing or simply attending) these latter two when Covid permits of course.
If you’ve got this far you will know that the title of this retirement blog is merely a cover or an excuse even, for me writing yet another blog as therapy. By writing about my stressors – gate and forest fires – it helps me to keep them under some kind of control which, as you will know, is one of my key objectives in my retirement. Trying for too much excitement risks one’s life slipping out of that desired control. Just keep that in mind.