I’m a big fan of the journalism of The Guardian and The Observer. I’d have to be to continue paying £3.20 each, every Saturday and Sunday for a decreasing content and an unhealthy bias in certain areas. Similarly I pay an unknown amount for The Guardian on-line* which I never read (I don’t like reading newspapers on line. I much prefer the real thing and the bonus frustration of trying to turn the pages with my increasingly shaky and fumbling fingers.
What I value more than anything is the inspiration it offers, most weeks, to write a retirement blog that goes beyond my own small world and into the experiences of others out there. Hence I read both papers with an eye for a good story in terms of this retirement blog.
The article in the picture above was a case in point although I have to say that although this article, or rather the topic for the article, took up a whole page including, as it did a totally pointless photograph, I found it disappointing. But hey, these are difficult times for newspapers, so man up.
If I were to summarise the whole page it basically said, some people aren’t looking forward to the end of lockdown because they have been happy to stay at home. People prone to anxiety are likely to find the prospect of change quite challenging. While at home they have been able to restrict and control all those factors that were a burden prior to lockdown and will be again (and perhaps more so given those factors have been absent and are now returning) when lockdown ends.
As per usual they roll out a tame psychiatrist (in this case) whose sensible but rather banal advice was to take it slowly (expose themselves in a safe and incremental way to some of the discomfort if they want to come out of lockdown successfully’). Oh and if you’re an anxiety or OCD sufferer, they love their labels don’t they, you may need to seek professional help He notes ‘mental health services are open and taking referrals’.
Otherwise try deep breathing and visualising positive scenarios (a version of try and look on the bright side) and a bit of CBT assuming the reader knows what that is. As I say, all very sensible, but perhaps I had hoped for rather more with a headline – ‘End of lockdown predicted to worsen anxiety disorders’. Well no shit, Sherlock.
But what the article did do was encourage me to think about me. Again no surprise there. The question being, with the end of lockdown in sight, how do I, as a retired person, feel about it? I do have to admit, a bit unwillingly, an element of anxiety, call it worry, about how I will cope with the full-on world that awaits me.
Driving, public transport, getting to the bar or seated in a restaurant, people passing too close to me in the park, visiting my local music shop (about the only shopping I’m likely to do). Mrs Summerhouse likens the change to when we got back from New Zealand after living there for 16 months (name droppers aren’t we) and the noise and bustle we noticed after the relative calm of NZ. And she worries about the future of her yoga class.
But then I have another thought and this may just be the strangest thing I’ve ever written in these retirement blogs. It is that, at this time of perceived great change, nothing much has changed at all. What has changed is me and specifically my ability to cope with change. I fear, as I have got older, I have become less resilient. Not a happy thought.
And I do have one more anxiety-provoking thought. As the article above talked about going slow when we come out of lockdown, no reason to rush it, it occurs to me that we may be in danger of trying to go too fast. Namely in the form of our Colorado cabin project and specifically in terms of a possible trip to Colorado in the autumn – September or October.
If we really were committed to the idea of going slow (and it’s an approach I’ve always recommended to my ‘clients’ in the past) then the variety particularly in the form of travel should probably be a trip to Ireland, or short stays in some of the hotels we’ve enjoyed in the past. Maybe that (going slow) was the key point of the article, on mature reflection. Leaving the dogs and flying for 6,000 (whatever) miles feels at this point overly-ambitious. It may be taken out of our hands, i.e. organised on our behalf, so in that case it would be more a question of ‘simply’ going with the flow. This arguably would be less stressful. Maybe…
So yes, we all have our, soon to be, hopefully, post-lockdown anxieties. But on the positive side of lockdown ending I’m looking forward to variety. We’ve done a pretty good job, as I’ve written elsewhere, of putting variety into our day-to-day lives but it doesn’t entirely compensate for a lack of travel to our other properties, or visits to dog-friendly hotels or even Ireland our May visit we cancelled this week.
So that’s all pretty confusing is it not. Having spent an hour or so trying to write my thoughts into some kind of sensible plan, I’ve largely failed. The road ahead remains twisty turny, uppy downy. In other words as one of the world’s great control freaks I remain largely unable to control my immediate post-lockdown future. And that’s about as clear as our short-term future is going to get.
*I had an email from them saying we could, as part of our digital subscription, access The Books of 2021. That’s nice but what is it?