This lethargy of purpose, of finding routine so bland and underwhelming that we begin to question our need to continue with them and therefore plunge into a spiral of laziness. From the heater skelter existence of commitment and deadlines,( usually someone else’s ), to an oasis of not having anything to do except the mundane housekeeping. One starts to fall back on the search for a reason. Hamlets forlorn cry “To be or not to be” rings in our ears.
It’s not depression I'm describing since one can find plenty of mental solis in reading and writing. The trip to visit friends or see a place you had wanted to see are the stuff of the retiree but the instinct to seek 'fulfilment' is missing.
When young fulfilment was about the girl next door, the opportunity to make money, the new car and progress at work. Ones children gave immediate fulfilment as they succeeded navigating their own obstacles and became rounded individuals. You were an integrated part of the surrounding world and the interplay made you a member of the human club
Retirement and old age takes away in large part your membership of this club and as you see them slink off in the early morning light you reflect on the silence of an empty street.
I'm urged to join a club, make friends with people of my own age, perhaps go on a sea voyage designed to accommodate the oldies. All these solutions miss the point, they are alternatives they belong to a world of the past not the future. The talk is of past achievements, not tomorrow's opportunity, for many, tomorrow is a dark and frightening place as they consider their mortality.
Ageing and retirement was always seen as an opportunity to reignite self interests and hobbies which work had denied. Trips taken at leisure, without deadlines which were implicit in the return to work, this social freedom would fill the space of work.
Perhaps because we have become so conditioned by routine during the time we spent working and made us oblivious to our own spatial needs, indeed it seems to have blunted our ability to reinvest the remaining energy when the opportunity came around. Holidays were always prized because we saw in them a release from work and it's arcane responsibility. The ability to get up when you wanted and to saunter into a new holiday environment was the classic antithesis of the routine of daily employment but when it came you were swamped like Willy Wonker in the chocolate factory, there was just too much time on your hands and you become lost in the ways to fill it.
There is also the lingering Presbyterian guilt tied up in 'idle hands'. To be busy is to avoid self absorption too much contemplative me time which skews the productive person you have been trained to be. Guilt and a lingering concern that not being gainfully at work is somehow immoral is difficult to shake off.
And then of course there's the money angle where the value of what we do is measured in terms of the money. Money that alternative kudos for much of life's activity, the wealth we create and the ostentatious buying which often accompanies it are important drivers as to why we devote most of our lives to earning as much as we can to the detriment of much else.
These lessons learned through life are hard to put aside and unless the income from ones investments is, in Mr Micawbers definition of "happiness" (annual income 20 shillings, annual expenditure 19 shillings and 6 pence, result happiness) then a dwindling balance and the need to provide "now a days" for expensive old age care, the dreadful arithmetic of the pension pot, (if you are lucky enough to have one), becomes ever more important.
Retirement then is a two edged sword but then who said, life was easy.
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