These are interesting retirement times we live in. Events, you might call them opportunities, come and go at alarming speed, sometimes they just come and stay. Often they require a decision – is this opportunity a keeper or should I simply throw it back into the dark water from whence it came? A number of things are happening in our retirement and they are above and beyond any anticipated or planned for retirement experiences. They lead, eventually, to the seemingly simple question – how much does a person try to insert into their retirement time? The whole thing feels like a financial balance sheet without the finances. Opportunities, if I may call them that, present themselves while others disappear. In choosing which opportunities to ‘take advantage of’, the trick is to maintain a balance in those activities you then have including the ones you have hung on to. A challenge I have written about before in these blog pages.
In this case, at this point in my retirement, the challenge is to keep a balance between taking on too much and not having enough to do and being bored. Sounds simple when you put it like that. The trouble is that circumstances keep changing. You try to line everything up so you can make a sensible decision about what your retirement might be like and then either something else comes along or an ‘activity’ disappears. For example, when my mother’s funeral and all subsequent legal niceties are out of the way, there will be at least one day a week unfilled, in some weeks that would have been two days a week. A sizeable chunk of a retirement week.
Add, if this is not a contradiction, to this in, the what we might call, deficit column the likelihood that the school work I was doing won’t continue and I won’t go out of my way to generate any more. I am not sure what working for this period of time has proved, probably not very much, little in the way of a clear idea of the future. I did enjoy it and I have written about the boost to my self esteem that the five weeks work gave to me. But there is a big question about whether this way of boosting my self esteem makes sense in the long term. So let’s say, for now, that the school work drops out of the equation. That’s another day open. Some people would say, and I might even be one of them, well just leave it open and as I’ve written elsewhere, just kick back and relax. Unfortunately the words relax, take it easy, as I’ve said, do not fit easily into my lexicon.
Now for the other side of the equation, options possibly, and I say possibly, coming on stream that might fill the gap above. The first of these revolves around number one son and his gardening business. Again I’ve written about this before in the sense that we have been ‘covering’ his business one way and another, mostly financial, while he enjoyed a protracted stay in Australia. He has returned and again, as I’ve written elsewhere, he is not a happy bunny. More or less his first line of greeting was that he was going back in August, this has now become the first week in June. Which means we have less than two months to decide what happens to the business while he is away, or in other words, is this the activity that fills part, or even all, of the gap? And in fact since I started this blog this retirement ‘option’ has firmed up somewhat, but more of this later.
Then there is the project with my old chum from America. This is far from being settled or clear as to what it entails or whether there is a role in it that I can fill. But the question is do I want it to firm up? Do I actually need the undoubted aggravation that would come from working again. I haven’t had any in-depth conversation with my pal, so I’m not really in a position to make any informed judgements but, once again, it’s interesting that there is a part of my brain that undoubtedly wants to be offered what might once have been called work. Again more of this at a later stage.
So what is this blog about? Making choices in retirement? Trying to achieve that perfect balance between engagement and laid backness? One of the first blogs I ever wrote –the perfect retirement – in it the premise of perfection, not achievable I know, but OK as a broadly guiding principle, was the idea of balance, a word dangerously close to harmony. As I’ve confessed, I have never been a harmonious kind of person. Pushing, pushing, seeking, seeking and here’s the irony, now I’m retired I seem to be operating more in this way and less in the Garrison Keiller mode of kicking back and cultivating a certain loucheness as I believe Garrison put it in that inimitable way he has with words.
Look, I know this in great danger of becoming a bit boring, self-indulgent even, but then it is my blog and I can say what I want, but there does come a point when saying what you want becomes unhelpful and the idea of writing as therapy becomes writing as wallowing. There’s no doubt I’m going through a difficult patch what with funerals, weddings, finances, working arrangements etc. etc. so it’s quite possible that my judgement is a bit skewed. Retirement has become a confusing business but then I’ve always had the capacity to do that – make something simple complicated