Retirement blog : Intelligent retirement thinking

I think I have written before, in these retirement blogs, that many of my ideas for a blog come to me as we are walking the dogs. They come from nowhere and, unless I make an effort to remember them like telling Mrs Summerhouse to remember the idea or repeating them until I think I couldn’t possibly forget the idea (which nevertheless I do), they disappear into nowhere.

Either way after a short while, it’s back to throwing the ball and hoping I will recall the idea when I get home. Which in the case of the above I did. I’m sure I remembered it because it’s such a great idea for a retirement blog, how could I not remember. It’s clickbait for sure.

So I wrote it down, as above, and returned to it later to start writing. Only one small problem, I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to write. Perhaps I wanted to avoid revisiting the many bits and bobs, or words of wisdom I’ve written before in these retirement blogs. You know the ones – get a new identity, take care of your self-esteem, set thoughtful targets and so on.

I knew I was in trouble when I found myself googling quotes on positive views of old age. Shakespeare even. But none of the bard’s wise-ness did I find interesting, verily I say. I found a link by somebody who had put together a list of 50, no less, quotes about positive views of old age. I should have known that a jaded old cynic like me would find no comfort here. A hint of Simon and Garfunkel there. Yep, I’m struggling.

The only quote I liked was the one along the lines of – old age sucks, always has, always will. Just before you accuse me of negativity let me just offer a word of caution about dismissing this quote too quickly if you’re trying to write about intelligent retirement thinking. I think this quote could reasonably be seen as an example from the ‘keep your thinking realistic and go from there’ category.

I could argue setting realistic targets, for example, is intelligent thinking. Or always looking on the bright-side just upsets other people. I sometimes have to castigate Mrs Summerhouse for always being so bleedin’ positive.  I don’t know, you decide.

The only other quote from the list, which seemed to me incidentally a fairly transparent attempt to publicise the person’s website or whatever, was from a Betty Friedan. She said ‘Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.’ Having tried and failed to get the top off a new bottle of maple syrup  this morning, I’m not sure about the last bit, but there are of course different forms of strength or I hope so otherwise I’m buggered.

Anyway I like the idea of retirement as a new stage in our lives with all the demands and requirements we had before but in a different, re-designed form of our own choosing. Hence my blog that mentioned retirement as a new career opportunity. I actually think this is intelligent thinking. But it’s not a blog’s worth is it?

So I turned to the idea of unintelligent thinking to see if that unlocked any interesting ideas. In short it didn’t really. True there’s advice around, staying away from negative views of retirement or saying no to anxious thinking or worrying thoughts or being a pessimistic old git. Yes, I could reframe that as something along the lines of always finding the positive in your experiences even when all around seems dark and gloomy. But that’s just too happy clappy for my tastes and, as I wrote above, taken too far, it just pisses people off.

So, despite the enticing nature of the title of this retirement blog, I have to admit that, in terms of presenting you, the reader, with some cast iron examples of intelligent thinking, I’m not doing too well. And that’s another one of my overlong sentences.

Maybe I should be googling ‘intelligent’ and seeing if that prompts any good ideas. What came up from a site called Neuronation.com was this – 6 tips for intelligent thinking. OK, sounds promising. In brief they were – 1) learn from your mistakes. 2) Re-evaluate your views. 3) Recover from failures. 4) Make your own luck. 5) Push for what you believe in. 6) Know that actions speak louder than words.

OK, nothing immediately earth-shattering there but let’s see if I can apply them to the title of this blog. First one, given we’re presumably 65 plus and if, like me, you’ve made a good number of mistakes in your life (comes with taking risks) there should be plenty of learning to follow. Is this the time to do it? Well maybe or we could just say f— it and go to the (dog-friendly) pub or wherever.

Re-evaluate your views. I’d think this was pretty sensible advice if you think of it in  terms of stopping thinking of old people as costing the NHS a fortune and hence candidates for euthanasia. Instead see us as huge assets to the community, whether we are or not.

Recover from failure. Good thinking this, after all given we don’t have long to ‘recover’ we can’t hang about in our recovering. Or we could just blame senility and forget all about the mistake. Make your own luck. Definitely, again no use hanging around waiting for fortune to smile on us. Be proactive and get on with it. Finally actions and words. It’s possible that with old age both will become increasingly difficult, so intelligent thinking would probably be never mind which precedes which, just get on with it (again). Whatever the ‘it’ may be.

I think it’s about time to give up on my search for what constitutes ‘intelligent thinking’ for the retired person and just recommend reading, or even rereading, the previous 700 or so blogs that have made up The Summerhouse Years. With all those words previously written I must have said something about intelligent thinking or even intelligent behaviour for the retired person. Just sort out the good bits and sorry about the misleading title. As with most clickbait you thought there were going to be answers in here and there aren’t. Soz as we used to say at school.