Resilience is a concept I was always very fond of as a working psychologist. I still am quite attached to the idea of resilience in my retirement. The problem is I’m losing it. I think we both are, Mrs Summerhouse and I. We seem to be more easily pulled out of shape by life’s, often not all that serious, events.
For example and I’ll let you decide where the latest cock up from this government, leading to a petrol shortage at the pumps, ranks for you on the minor to major life irritation scale. Hopefully if you’re in the UK and reading this and retired you haven’t got the pressure of getting to work and all that that entails.
You may be retired and still need to get around in your vehicle. As I say you decide for yourself how serious this is for you. For us on Saturday we had an opportunity to test this idea of resilience and to what degree we’d lost it. We had been in Derbyshire for a fun break and we needed to get home to Leeds and there was and is a shortage of petrol (gas to my American readers).
Fortunately we were driving our small car, the Kia Piccanto, engine size 1,000cc and about 45 mpg. It was less than half full when we set off for the 70 mile journey. If we’d been in the Defender or even the van (unlikely as my neighbour uses it more than I do) we would have been doomed indeed. But we weren’t, we were in the Kia; nevertheless Mrs SH decided to panic. We won’t make it, she said. I sought to reassure her but failed at least until we were half way home (passing Sheffield) and the needle hadn’t moved that much. Then she started to believe.
Until that point I had spent a long time reminding her of our past experiences in terms of running out of petrol. I’d had to dig deep, very deep, back to 1979 in fact and our trip across America at the end of our exchange year, to come up with an example that meant something to her.
As some of my American readers may remember this was the year of gas lines. This has a very different meaning in the UK and, at this time, in this country, yet another problem, we don’t have the gas we need in those gas lines and the price is going up. But I digress.
Back in 1979 we had a choice. Either not take the trip out to the West coast, up that same coast and then back again to Washington DC where we sort of lived, or miss our one and only chance of seeing America in all its bigness. I reminded her of our boldness back then.
As we drove gently up the M1, trying to conserve petrol, (at 60 mph it takes a long time) I amused myself by comparing the car we were driving then (with small child in the back) with the car we were driving now. The difference was stark and hence so was the challenge we faced back then.
I even got out my phone calculator to convert the 440 cu ins engine size of the Pontiac Firebird Transam to cubic centimetres(cc). It worked out at well over 7 litres or 7,000 ccs. More than 7 times the size of the Piccanto engine. Unsurprisingly, if I remember correctly, the Transam (as above, just an excuse to feature it again, it was this photo or one of petrol queues demonstrating a lack of resilience) did about 12 miles to the American gallon. Pass anything on the road except a gas station, my American friends used to joke. Still I wanted an American car as part of our exchange experience and my goodness we got one. And a lot of speeding tickets in that the police were particularly keen to punish any driver they thought was using up precious gas unnecessarily.
But off we fearlessly set (it was, as I say, now or probably never for us) for a couple of months of empty roads, empty campsites and stopping when the tank got so empty as to make driving any further positively hazardous. It meant we over-nighted in some interesting places at least until the gas station opened in the morning or even when the delivery tanker arrived maybe later in the week.
Honestly was this the same couple (minus small child) that set off with trepidation up the M1 with petrol stations every thirty miles albeit with exorbitant prices. At least back then gas was about a dollar a gallon. But how are the mighty fallen, I ask myself.
So, suitably chastened by my ‘remember when we’ … line of conversation, Mrs SH crawled along in the slow lane, not her usual location, and we arrive back in Leeds unscathed while the rest of the UK apparently go insane queueing (waiting in line) for what’s left of the UK’s petrol supply.
But this experience did cause me to ponder on how much less resilient we have become as we have matured. There seems to be very little of the idea of mellowing or becoming more philosophical as we’ve got older and particularly now we’re retired. Musical problems, more of which in a later retirement blog; technical blog problems (vis a vis the missing comments box) and vineyard challenges to name but three, and all causing me more problems and more emotional damage than they should be doing.
And now, beyond any irritations of our own, our government has contrived through its ineptitude to gift us, no petrol, no gas, restricted holidays and empty food shelves. If you were a firm believer in the importance to our mental health of reframing the negative as a positive, then there’s plenty of opportunity to put the concept into practice.
In my professional days much of my interest with the idea of resilience was concerned with whether kids that didn’t have it could be taught it or helped to develop it. Now here I am having the same thoughts only this time as they apply to myself. Ha. Funny business this retirement.