Retirement blog : will this pandemic mellow me out?

I think this really will be a short blog but who knows. I read a couple of articles in The Observer last Sunday. The paper is getting thinner and thinner but we keep buying it out of some kind of loyalty and, although there seems like less of it, the quality is as good as ever.

Particularly in the sense of giving me ideas for these retirement blogs. So this blog was prompted by a question and answer session with a French guy name of Bruno Latour (probably a philosopher, the French seem to do that sort of thing better than us Brits). One of the questions asked of him was,

At the beginning of the pandemic you suggested everybody ask themselves what they would like to keep from lockdown, what would they like to change? Those questions are now being asked all over the world. Has the interest surprised you?

His answer was,

The lockdown forced everyone into a kind of retreat, a moment for reflection. It was quite extraordinary. The questions were therapeutic. They gave people powerlessly stuck at home a way of thinking about how they would create a better future.

I liked this in two ways. First, as you may realise from previous retirement blogs, I like the idea of trying to take as much control of our retirement lives as is possible. At a time of our lives when the lack of a job (now a lot more people in this situation) can make us feel a bit irrelevant generally and living a life in which things happen to us rather than are determined by us, then the prospect of keeping control of our well-being is an attractive one. So I like Bruno’s message that these two simple questions go some way to facilitating this.

Second, in my work of yesteryear as a psychologist, myself and a number of colleagues, were committed to the use of questions to facilitate change in a ‘client’s’ situation. One colleague and I even started to write a book called The World’s Best Questions. At least that was its working title. And a working title was about as far as we got. Shame, I still think it’s got best seller stamped all over it. I digress. So that Bruno would promote these simple but powerful questions as therapeutic, at these times of anxiety and stress, appeals a great deal.

Of course I felt compelled to ask Mrs Summerhouse what she would like to keep / change. We got as far as the ‘keeping’ bit before one of the dogs chased a Frisbee not belonging to us, or some such. She wanted to keep the neighbourliness or sense of community this pandemic has generated. I, on the other hand, and no surprise, given what I wrote recently, would like to keep the feeling of a simplified lifestyle.

Elsewhere in the same section of the paper was an article promisingly titled The Psychological Cost of Covid-19. Obviously I was interested in this but I have to confess, as it focused almost exclusively on the damage to the mental health of those professionals involved ‘on the front line’, important though this is, not least to them, it didn’t interest me. Sounds bad I know but there it is.

However, there was one small paragraph that linked to the simplicity concept, that did strike a chord. Psychotherapist, Susie Orbach, was quoted as saying that the pandemic had forced people to slow down, to be less frantic. She said, “I think not being frantic was a challenge for some people, but for others, the not doing and simply being became almost mindful. To just be is actually quite liberating.”

I suppose as the least-relaxed, most-driven human being I know, I should have these words tattooed somewhere I can see them. Now Mrs Summerhouse doesn’t have a problem with all this ‘be in the moment’ stuff. Her yogic, Buddhist leanings have always worked in this way for her, but not for me.

Maybe the pandemic will have that effect, you know kind of mellow me out, man. I doubt it, but I suppose, stranger things have happened. All you have to do is to continue reading these retirement blogs to find out.