NOT WORKING- NOT REALLY!

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 I am retired.  Those words used to be synonymous with 'not working' but today they more often mean 'fully occupied in non paying activities'. What happened to our retirement vision of long lazy days reading all those books we never had time for, taking up painting, writing, woodwork, sculpture, golf, whatever activity seemed most attractive and out of reach in a 'working' life?

Retirees do participate in a lot of interesting activities but frequently  one hears the comment "No I just don't have time for that".  I can certainly understand that, how on earth do people find time to blog?  I enjoy writing, talking to people, developing ideas so blogging looked  ideal  for someone like me, but; when do I fit it in?  Certainly it takes longer to get things done nowadays, I've already talked about that in another post, but just looking at my calendar,  jampacked with a whole range of commitments, makes me tired.I also  have a large garden (mostly neglected) two dogs to walk, two cats to commune with and a partner who expects that I will occasionally sit down and talk as well as cooking, cleaning etc. Then of course there is the "Family"! I live 500 kilometres away from the nearest of my family so visits, just for contact or to help out mean a minimum of three days away from home.  It's unrealistic to expect family to get down here very often as they have work and children to fit into their timetables so the onus is on me to make the trip.

Now I'm not alone in being time short, everyone I meet talks about it.  I have just been trying to arrange a lunch with a friend in the next town and the exchange of emails would be quite funny if it wasn't so worrying!
We swapped  dates and times back and forwards for days before being able to reach a suitable one. When I was working I could often meet friends for lunch why is it so hard now?  Work occupied a large block of time every day, six, seven or eight hours.  Mostly a block of time that was non-negotiable and accepted as such.  Other activities got fitted in at the weekend or some evenings.  But our activities were probably realistic in terms of what we could manage whereas being retired has taken away the 'block' each day and now we have filled it with a multitude of activities all of varying times and locations so our days feel fragmented and far too busy.

Creative activities like painting and writing take time, so it looks like having to make some hard decisions soon regarding setting priorities.  Just what should I give up in order to be the creative person I had hoped to be when I 'retired'. Here's hoping I don't decide to give up blogging!

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Yo-Yo Lives

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Perhaps it is just more noticeable in a country town, the number of people on the move. Not leaving, but coming and going all the time, up and down the highway to the city.    It doesn't matter what organisation there are always people missing whether  at a meeting or choir practice, hospital volunteers, bridge club.  "Oh so and so will be back in a few days, three weeks, two months"

No matter the length of time it is now just accepted as a way of life.  It may be due to the increasing number of retired people who, free from the time constraints of working life, enjoy being able to just go - whenever the mood takes them.  How different from previous generations who 'stayed put' for most of their lives, perhaps having an annual holiday but mostly not.

Where do these people go?  Travelling, holidays both local and overseas, health reasons where they  have to visit specialists in the city or family reasons, mostly visiting children and grandchildren or like me babysitting.

It can be difficult when living at a distance from family to give that regular support which is so important to young families. So grandparents like me find themselves taking up residence for a few weeks at a time to provide  "essential services" for grandchildren.

There have been loads of films and books over the years dealing with parallel lives, well sometimes that’s what I feel my yo-yo life is.  While I am in the city, fully immersed in the grandmother role, my life at home is continuing.  My partner lives his usual life, immersed in his musical interests, my pets continue to demand attention, food, exercise and the different organisations I belong to carry on as before while I stay tenuously connected by email, text messages and phone.

Do I enjoy it? The variety, change of scenery, different roles?  Well yes I do enjoy all of those things as well as spending time with my grandchildren and helping my daughter but there is a price to pay, a sense of dislocation.  When I come home after a spell away it takes time to settle back into this life here, adjusting to a different space, a different pace and then I discover all the interesting things which happened in town which I missed out on.  In  reverse when I get to the city it never quite coincides with the show I wanted to catch or the film that got rave reviews finishes the week before I arrive.  The weather is different so I often feel that I don’t have the right clothes with me.

But the major benefit is I'm certainly not in  a rut and I don’t take the beauty of either life for granted.

Something in the Air

This morning I woke up feeling absolutely marvellous - full of energy - good humour and feeling physically very fit - wonderful feeling!  Yet some mornings I wake up feeling 100 years old , full of aches and pains and really just want to sit beside the fire - why the difference?  No obvious reasons, no changes in food or sleep or alcohol consumption - so it has to be something in the air - right?

Actually I thought the idea of something in the air sounded a little far fetched so I tried to find some practical, physiological answers to my question - why the difference? What I found was a lot of interesting facts about energy but nothing particularly relevant to my question. What stood out was the emphasis on the different cycles our bodies go through, the different developmental stages - Shakespeare's Seven Stages of Man, the sleep cycle where we pass through five stages of sleep each stage lasting 90 minutes which research now shows is continued in our waking hours where we oscillate every 90 minutes from high to low alertness - many people relate this rythmic process of life to something like biorythms or the affect of our star sign.

                          "We're physiologically designed to pulse, to move rhythmically 

                              between spending and renewing energy" Tony Schwartz - NYT  
         
But none of it seemed to relate to those high energy days which just seem to come out of the blue.
Now I may have to keep an energy journal to see if I can identify any sort of pattern in my good
day/bad days and if there was - what would I do - sit around and read a good book when I thought it might be a bad day?                                 

                                                                                 

So what did I do with my marvellous morning?I blitzed through virtually everything in my 'to do' list and had a most enjoyable, productive day - thank goodness for whatever was in the air!

Too Busy!

When I was working I used to meet retired people who kept telling me how busy they were.   They would list all the things they had done in a day and I would think "so...????? I do that plus work". So I made a resolution, when I retired, not to be 'busy'.  I spent my first year of retirement refusing to join anything or take up a hobby and the result was that I sat around doing nothing and getting depressed.


  Gradually I became  involved in things which interested me - Oral History Interviews for the local Historical Society and volunteering at the Aged Care Facility, book clubs, Writing Groups  plus of course garden, family, reading, writing.


Now I'm  'busy' - I frequently find I haven't got time to do something I really want to do or time to do nothing.  This lack of time got me wondering if it really is true that time passes  more quickly when you are older.

Apparently not! Recent research involving people aged 18 - 80 across two continents  showed almost no difference in their perception of time, the only slight difference and it wasn't considered a significant one, was in the perception of how quickly the last ten years had gone by, there older people felt it had gone past much more quickly.

So why do older people feel that for them time passes more quickly? One researcher suggests that people report what they think they are expected to feel but the more likely explanation is that they forget just how busy they were when they were young!   Also time does fly when you feel rushed and can't get things done. Now that makes a lot of sense to me, as we get older it often takes us longer to get organised and longer to to finish a task hence the feeling of being rushed.

But perhaps  the other explanation is simply that everyone feels more rushed nowadays!

Happier Older Wiser - A Community of Minds.

When I retired we moved to a small town, a town I had always wanted to live in, and I am happy to be here. However I found it difficult to settle down to being retired, struggling with the feeling that I was being a dilettante, playing at life.  After a while I worked out that what I was missing was a Community of Minds, being  involved with a group of people able and willing to discuss books, philosophy, politics,  spirituality, the whole wonderful world of ideas. 

I thought a blog would help  to expand my life, the range of people I communicate with and my writing skills.  The internet is a marvellous tool for each of these. So I decided to put myself out there and see how many likeminded people I could meet. That’s not to say people who think the same as me, just people who are prepared to think.

So here I am with my first blog post, hoping to make contact with other of the same ilk.  I have lots of ideas on what I would like to include, sections for people to contribute their writing, topics for discussion, book reviews, and the opportunity for others to contribute their ideas. So please do – share your ideas on additions to this blog or what you think about the possibility of a Community of Minds.