I have never been very good at relaxing. Even the simple act of sitting still has proved difficult. You can understand then why the prospect of retirement way back when filled me with a nervous dread and why I spent so much time planning this period of my life. Hence my efforts to break my retirement into a given number of activities – travel, writing, reading, music (playing), vineyard, outdoor exercise, even at one point drawing up weekly timetables to ensure each chosen activity got its fair share of my time. That’s how worried I was about having nothing to do.
I can’t say it all worked out as initially planned. Laughably so in some ways. A short time before retiring I predicted that my retirement life would be about golf, photography and travel. For different reasons none of these happened and the worries about relaxing stayed with me.
Ironically, in the words of a Ry Cooder song, ‘the very thing that makes you rich make you poor’. JPMPI TYE 26 – Wardrobe (30h) sorry about the ads. I didn’t quite understand it then and still don’t but what I take it to mean is that what you predict to be good turns out quite differently. So in this case the unplanned arrival of two border collies two weeks after we retired, completely kiboshed our long distance travel plans. But the two same dogs are one of the most pleasant parts of our retirement. And we do still travel but now shorter distances and to dog-friendly destinations.
Back to clear positives. More specifically these doggies enable me to relax when otherwise I would have found this difficult nay, impossible. The fact that they have been with us thirteen years (and therefore are 13 years old) means that they might not have very much longer to be with us. God willing another 2 or 3 years but you never know when they get to a certain age. Which means that I do not consider time spent with them (whether lying on the sofa or throwing the ball for them to chase (more slowly these days) to be time wasted. But it’s the sitting on the sofa with them doing nothing that is a real asset right now.
It’s an activity (barely) that I would find impossible without them being with me. Whereas without them I would have been fretting that I was wasting precious time, now I do not begrudge a single second of time spent with them even if it does mean nothing more than all four of us napping together.
So there we are, so much for retirement planning. When we started this retirement business, true to my nature I planned the bejesus out of it but what do you know the very thing etc. or to put it another way the very aspect that wasn’t even on the list i.e. getting a dog/s is the thing that is giving me /us most pleasure now. Go figure.
I would certainly never have written that 13 years ago when we were setting out on our retirement journey when planning was everything but now not so much.