Retirement worries, for better or worse? So after several retirement blogs looking on the sunny side of (retirement) life let me get back to what I’m best at – worrying negativity. That’s two separate concepts by the way, not suggesting that worrying itself is a negative exercise, if you follow my drift.
Some people would say what’s the point of worrying anyway? I would have thought the answer is obvious, it’s to prevent whatever it is you’re worrying about actually happening. I have to admit the simplicity of this explanation is somewhat clouded by the fact that there is imagined worrying and genuine worrying, but the principle remains firm.
For example, as I lay awake last night my mind wandered around the following topics. They usually operate in a kind of loop. Will the planners try and stop us using our barn and associated vineyard because we’re contravening some kind of planning law. And why haven’t we heard from them since we submitted the form several weeks ago. Is this a good or bad sign? Have they just forgotten about it all or are they taking their time to prepare something fiendish?
At a slightly more rational level, what’s going to happen to the new vines we’ve just planted. Will the vines wither on the vines, as the expression has it, like so many that have gone on before this latest set? I worry about what killed the past editions , but don’t know what did and hence I can’t prevent a repeat performance.
Moving up the worry scale, in less than two weeks we take our long-awaited trip to the USA. There’s so much to worry about here that I can’t begin to describe them all. I suppose these could all go into the imagined category. Is this normal for a 73 year-old man who has travelled the world to be worrying about what could go wrong on a celebratory trip for his and Mrs Summerhouse’s 50 wedding anniversary.
There is of course a whole sub set of worries that go along with this trip. The biggest of which is probably, will the dogs be OK with our friends on the farm or, even more of a worry, will they like it too much and not want to return to their boring life with us?
Then we have another subset of a subset of worries about the trip, biggest of which, after the dogs, is please don’t let us catch Covid in the next two weeks because that would throw everything into disarray, to put it mildly. Who will we get to water the plants, will our conservatory roof panel get repaired before we go and what about burglars? And that’s without even trying to think up worries. They just flow naturally.
And finally, for the moment anyway, there’s my up and coming brain scan. Sounds exotic does it not? It’s just that old Parkinson’s thing again or, to quote the consultant, a tremor dominant form of Parkinson’s disease (love that last word, disease, although on Googling the term it seems it’s not quite as serious as ordinary Parkinson’s) but I’ll have to wait for the results of the scan to see whether I’ve got the very bad one or the not quite as bad version. Now here’s something worth worrying about I suppose.
Oh, and after my missed prostate phone call, will I get a letter, as promised, and what will it say and will it address the problem or simply state the bleedin’ obvious, yes, your prostate is enlarged, thank you, call again.
I think the rest of my retirement life is made up of the usual (doesn’t everybody have them or something similar?) lower level worries – when should we buy our bedding plants, when do we pay the latest garage bill and should we take the van in for repair even though the AA man says the censor is registering 120 degrees but it’s quite safe. And what about this retirement blog, why aren’t I on page 1 of Google when that’s where I used to be?
And of course there’s always the music side of things. Will I do another outdoor gig (farmer’s markets), am I doing too many (3 more coming up) and will I slow down and follow our conductor or just ignore her and go at my own pace? Was the success of my first (in a long time jazz group) merely beginnner’s luck or do I now have a new musical string to my bow? So much to consider, no wonder I often feel so tired.
Retirement worries summary
So that’s me, why is it that some people worry while others do not? What makes the difference? And what happens to our natural inclinations when we retire, do we worry more or less as we enter our golden age? I suppose in the early days of this retirement blog I might have attempted some form of psychological explanation for my current mental state of affairs. Now all I can say is, buggered if I know. You tell me.