I should point out first of all that to call me "retired" is a bit of a misnomer because even though it's been almost ten years since I had a real job, I never really had a career. But with that caveat, I'm still going to talk about retirement, because some of it applies to everyone.
My spouse finally fully retired at the end of 2025 after several years of cutting back, and as anyone who's been through this knows, you're not really retired until both of you are retired. While he was working, I still had a job, and it was called "keeping everything going while my spouse works." There is still all of that to do, but now there are two of us to do it, and fortunately my spouse is not the type to refuse to help out. He's playing a lot of tennis, but he's also doing more of the grocery shopping, mopping the floors, etc. (That's not to say the transition has always been easy in terms of our relationship, but we'll save that discussion for another time.)
What I wanted to say is something I've been thinking about quite a lot. Because when you finally reach this point in life, where you no longer have a paid (or unpaid) part in keeping society going, but you need to feel like you have something to contribute, and also boredom is lethal. You have to figure out what you're going to do.
There are probably some people who move to a golf community and do nothing but play golf and eat out for the rest of their lives, but that was never going to be me-- although I fully support your right to do that if it sounds good to you.
Is finally having enough time to read all I want enough to keep me going? (my golf equivalent)(ha). I'm still involved in a number of volunteer activities-- I still work at the food bank on Monday mornings, I'm in a couple of senior music groups (I play flute in one and percussion in the other), and I am an A/V tech at our church. I could increase any of those activities, or add some new ones, and stay plenty busy. They're all things I enjoy.
So is that enough? And I guess there's no way to know except to just keep going and see how it feels. That's a life-long hangup of mine, I want to know ahead of time whether or not something is going to work out and/or be successful, and of course you can't know that until you actually try. dammit. But do I "need" to keep writing a blog? Do I need to work on writing a memoir, as it seems everyone is doing these days? Should I keep writing book reviews on Goodreads? Those are all things I do because I enjoy them (well, not the memoir, I haven't done that)(yet?), but they're a fair amount of work, and no one would care if I quit. I don't mean this as a complaint, but simply as a statement of fact: no one said anything-- good or bad-- when I quit posting here. There's no reason to start up again other than the fact that I like to do it, and it fills a certain lifelong compulsion I have about putting words to things I think/feel as a way of understanding myself and my experience.
But is it necessary? There was a time maybe twenty years ago when writing teachers responded to comments like this by saying that EVERYONE SHOULD WRITE! WE SHOULD ALL BE WRITERS! But of course that's not right, either. There are millions of people who have zero desire to write, or on the other hand, millions of people who believed them and self-published on Amazon and now we're all afraid to download anything self-published because two-thirds of them are unbearable to read. (yes, of course there are exceptions).
So that was a lot of rambling to say that I'm feeling my way through this transition, as are many other people. If I'm going to keep blogging, maybe I should change up how I do it. More pictures. Shorter posts. Less editing. We'll see.
Maybe I will start a new thing, go a little crazy and just send posts off without agonizing. A WHOLE NEW WORLD.
But not this one, which I've edited half a dozen times now, and which is serving as a warning sign about the carefree posting, because it makes a whole lot more sense now than it did three days ago.
Hmmm. I wonder how pictures work when you're emailing posts. LEARNING CURVE AHEAD. And I did figure out how to schedule a post!
Have a good Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment