So retirement challenges, what might that mean? It seems to me that the key (one key at least) to a happy retirement is your capacity to strike a balance between challenge and inertia. In other words to set yourself the right degree of challenge in your retirement activities – not too hard or too easy to put it at the simplest level.
You may say well that’s the same for life as a whole. True but when we’re working many of life’s challenges are set for us. When we’re retired we typically (not always I agree) have the opportunity to set our own challenges and hence the level of difficulty a challenge holds for us.
It’s another way of saying we have the opportunity of deciding just how much stress we want to have as part of our retirement lives. Hand in glove with the decision about how bored do we want to be? Sometimes this is referred to as striking the balance between burn out and rust out.
And that’s what I’m about to do. This process will be in that area of retirement activity I call my musical endeavours. Those of you who have read my recent blogs will know that one of my retirement resolutions is to make sure I’m playing music in some way shape or form.
Tonight (Thursday) is the first night of 2022 of the Leeds Folk Fiddle group. I have decided to commit to playing guitar in this group because taking part in their music strikes about the right balance between challenge and comfort. Not too hard and not too easy you might say.
On Saturday I have a more difficult choice to make. This is to decide whether to join the North Leeds Music Centre jazz orchestra. The invitation to join this group in some form came through my Facebook page to me (and 10,000 others probably) before I come across as having been especially head-hunted. No that would be too grand.
So given that this form of music in the last context, the one I walked away from because it was causing me too much stress, offers the possibility of the same happening all over again, I have to make a choice. Do I try it out this Saturday morning or do I just let it go and refuse to give myself a hard time for taking the potentially easy way of retirement. You know like retired people are supposed to do according to one train of thought.
I must admit, at this point (Friday morning) I am completely undecided. My daughter and her husband (and probably one or two friends) who were 100% supportive of me walking away from the last jazz set-up, would undoubtedly say, why cause yourself any unnecessary psychological pain. Relax you’re supposed to be retired.
They’re right of course – in one way, but then again, it would be all too easy to slip slowly into that inertia that comes with old age, some people’s old age at least. Of course we’ve all read stories of 90 year olds who climb Everest or paddle-board around the world. But unfortunately that’s not me, I like a degree of comfort and predictability in my retirement life. But it’s that balance thing again.
Sounds simple enough doesn’t it? I simply need to ask myself will the amount of stress in joining this new group tip the balance into the burn out zone as I mentioned earlier? How hard can that be? Or I could assume that I’ll do it (join the group) but ask myself to consider what I could do to reduce, or at least manage, any associated stress.
It shouldn’t be beyond an ex-psychologist. It might have a lot to do with the currently-fashionable CBT in the form of faulty cognitions or irrational beliefs. Some of us were using these techniques a long time ago. Sound like a grumpy old retiree don’t I? Anyway there are no doubt quite a few of these thoughts mixed in with my playing music.
I don’t intend to go into these now but perhaps what I will do, should I decide to go to the class on Saturday morning, is to keep a careful ear open for these pernicious little chaps and maybe even make a note of them, both for my reference and maybe even for this retirement blog. Then I could present them in the form of typical unhelpful thoughts retired people can have when attempting to set themselves new challenges.
Retirement challenges summary
So there we are, that’s you bang up to date with my latest thinking (not faulty, I hope) about the challenge of setting challenges when you’re retired. All pretty straight-forward I think you’ll agree.
PS Folk Fiddle group went well.