The Reality of Retirement.
The approach to retirement often fills people’s minds with terror, as they think what will they do with all their time. For most having worked eight or nine hours a day for 45-50 years, they wonder how all this time is going to be filled and they panic themselves into planning certain tasks, joining certain clubs, looking for part-time or voluntary work, all very worthwhile and possibly pleasant diversions but often these pastimes are chosen too quickly and might not be exactly what is required for peace of mind. For after all in your working life you have had to persevere with fools, listen to idiots, be talked down to by so called authority, who mostly know nothing and generally take a battering from the gobshites that inhabit this land. What you need in retirement is peace of mind. You do not need to do anything to achieve this nirvana, all you need is time. Time to blow away all the crap that you have been force fed by companies, governments, newspapers, television, protocols, religious institutions and friends.
So my advice, and many will say take no heed, my advice is to do nothing. Sit there and empty your head of all its drivel, throw away your mobile phones straightaway, (mine is at the bottom of the Irish Sea, commissioned there by myself on that fateful journey by HSS when I finally cut the bonds that held me in 2005) try not to have a need for the media, go for a pint, have the crack and generally cleanse yourself.
When this state is reached and it might take a few weeks, a few months, perhaps years even, some might never come out of this eschewment of wordly matters and what harm, but when this state is reached, sit back and relax, you are nearly there. With me it probably took a year but I had a lot more mullock to dispose of than most.
I spent a year watching the tranquil Boyle River flow gently past my front door and this certainly acted as an emetic to swill away God’s own mountain of shite that I had picked up during my working life in England. A year watching this water and letting it baptize my mind for ventures new, a year when I did nothing, only antagonize my wife for doing nothing, who thought I should do something if only picking my nose. In this comatose state I kept all positivity and released all negativity. I espoused the institutions I thought I might benefit from and rejected anything from which I received bad vibrations. In fact I am still doing that after four years so this period of release is not hard and fast and these periods of renewal may overlap.
I remember one position I took up which gave me a certain responsibility and which I first of all enjoyed, but I treated it like work and tried to impose the bunkum I had been taught years before. I fell out with my nearest and dearest whilst imposing this clap-trap and then quickly realized that this position was not for me because I was again taking up my past and because falling out with your nearest and dearest is not one of the requisites of retirement. So what I do not want is responsibility, what I do want is freedom and time, time I might or might not have.
After some while in this torpor, my mind started to recover, it became foolhardy, it became brave. I can well understand those old codgers who want to climb mountains or jump out of aeroplanes, but that kind of buffoonery is not for me. I am more contemplative, more composed, more laid back really. Possibly my ideal type of life would be like Columcille’s monks in the Western church, one of the culdees, who devoted their lives to writing, having bad thoughts, knowing good women, supping a glass or two and generally enjoying themselves. Which they did for four or five hundred years before the Pope got a grip on himself and he often did, and said no more of that and sent in the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Premonstratensionists, the Benedictines, the Augustinians, the Cistercians and Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, in the guise of child molesters and other sexual perverts whose duty it was to stop anyone enjoying themselves and to put a lot more darkness in everybody’s day.
So I realized my dream, I started writing, moulding unjointed letters into words and words into meaning and clarity. Improving the quality and seeing the improvement. Making a passage interesting when at the beginning of it there were no words, ideas or even thoughts. In fact making something out of nothing like I have just done with this piece.
If in retirement we can make something out of nothing everyday we would all surely be replete and it will not eat into your pension as it costs nothing to do. So think hard and long and do not rush into anything, but remember peace of mind is the aim of all.
February 4th, 2010 at 8:18 am
I think that is an interesting point, it made me think a bit. Thanks for sparking my thinking cap. Sometimes I get so much in a rut that I just feel like a record.