There’s a rather obvious version of the above title as it applies to a retirement scenario. At its simplest it just means we have a lot of time to fill and no obvious / satisfactory way to fill it. This can mean we’re bored or, maybe, we’re relaxed depending on, what are sometimes called, your personality traits. I know where on the meter of life my needle most often rests but that’s just me.
Predictably perhaps I‘m in the Charles Darwin camp when he said “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” Women can waste as much time as they like apparently.
And, speaking of personality traits, there’s another aspect of retirement time-wise I haven’t read about in any books about preparing for retirement. With more time to fill there’s an increased opportunity to heighten your existing personality across the board. So if you were a relaxed person before retirement you have the space to become even more relaxed when you are retired.
Similarly, if you were of a tense disposition before now you can become even tenser. If you worried pre-retirement then here’s a God-(or whoever) sent opportunity to worry even more. Before retirement you had to fit in the worrying and the tension with your career. Set these characteristics on one side while you got on with the business of earning a living. Leave them behind at your front door. At the very least pick up a new set of worries as you cross the work threshold. Now, well you can give your short-comings, as you perceive them, free rein.
Yes, the opposite applies of course. If you were a happy and relaxed kind of person in pre-retirement, then here’s a grand opportunity to become even more of a smug, self-satisfied human-being. Sorry, that was a tad pejorative and rather gives away my natural disposition. I’ll move on.
It’s not just the time availability that’s central to our retirement well-being. There’s the, often experienced, lack of structure that retirement can bring along in its wake. True, many of us try and fill our retirement life with the structure of our newly-chosen activities – jazz, vineyard, blogging – that kind of thing and that helps. I say helps I mean this in terms of trying to stop or at least reduce the opportunity for negative thinking about what we have become in the (theoretically) golden years of our lives.
But structure in one’s life does provide us with the basis for all those creative or fun activities to rest on top. A bit like the chord structure in a jazz tune on top of which we’re encouraged to improvise. A difficult or even impossible task without the structure. At least unless you’re into Free jazz or ‘time no changes’ jazz. But that’s a rare beast and certainly not for me.
I like a bit of structure both in my jazz and my life. Without it my emotions (often negative) are pin-ponging around all over the place. Which brings me back to the theme, at least so far, of this blog, more space to be ill-at-ease.
I know what you’re thinking at this point. You’re thinking for goodness sake stop being so negative and use the time and space that retirement offers to have positive experiences, sometimes known as a good time. Assuming you have the health (more of which in a coming blog) and the money (also the topic of a forth-coming blog), how difficult can that be?
When you put it like that well, not difficult at all. All a person has to do is define their perfect retirement day and reproduce it endlessly. A bit like Groundhog Day. But, and there’s a big ‘but’, if I know my readers you’re thinking, nah, that’s not going to work. You’d be bored, like being sick because you’ve eaten too much rich food.
I need to take a break at the half-way point as we’ve got to make the journey 70 odd miles up the M1 to our Leeds house. I started this at the Derbyshire cottage and now we need to drive home or to another home at least. I tried to write a bit more on the M1 with Mrs Summerhouse driving but she had a coughing fit (her health issue) so I’ve stopped.
And now it’s Monday morning and I’ve started again with one other aspect of this time business that seems to figure increasingly as we move through our retirement. It’s an old cliché but one that is proving to be increasingly ‘true’. I believe I’ve mentioned it before in these blogs. It’s that old chestnut about time going quicker as you get older.
I used to pour scorn on older people who said words to the effect that time goes by at an increased rate when you get older. Even more irritating were people who, when they retired, say, I don’t know how I had time to work. But, bless my boots, here I am now in that very same older bracket and it turns out, the first one at least, to be absolutely true. Who’d have thought it? If Mrs Summerhouse and myself have said to each other, words to the effect – that was never a week / month / year ago – once, we’ve used those words a thousand times. Well a hundred anyway.
I did read somewhere an explanation of this feeling of time speeding up. I can’t quite remember it exactly but it was to the effect that, because we had less time left in our lives, what we had got was used up disproportionately quicker. Makes a certain kind of sense I guess.
And linked to this there’s another kind of cliché that life goes quicker if you’re enjoying yourself. Ergo the way to slow life down is to be a) bored b) unhappy. I’ll let you decided whether this strategy is one worth constructing. It doesn’t quite work for me but then that’s my retirement problem.