The dog's life...fear of pyjamas continued

I told my sister in law Susan that I was worried about retirement because I feared I wouldn’t get out of my pyjamas for three months and she just chortled (well, it was a a chortley email) “I know you love that job more than life itself, but when you retire you’ll be busier than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs” she told me.   I’m not sure, in the end, how comforted I am by that.  That kind of busy sounds frenetic and with no purpose than to avoid the pain of having my tail squashed.  I want to be busy, but purposefully…and combine that with a kind of instinctive lack of purpose. 

When I’m not disciplinedly writing, or painting, or tatting, …or whatever I decide to take up, and when I’ve finished my run and my meditation, I want to move from activity to activity, or indeed, activity to inactivity, like a dog.  I’m a great admirer of dogs.  They don’t think “What shall I do now?  I lay on that bolster yesterday, maybe I should try the couch.  No wait, I got in trouble for that...before” (they don’t have a strong sense of time). They just lie down where they want when they feel like lying down, or appear, wagging, at their dish suddenly and hopefully when they get that gnawing feeling.  Or watch the door intently when they want to walk, as they will have trained someone to respond to this adorable trait, who will open the door and take them out.  Once out, they experience nature intensely and fully…too fully some might say, but my point is, they are authentic, they are present.  And after an infinitely long pleasant day, it gets dark, and it is time to lie down wherever they can get away with.   They are the personification of mindfulness.  They are motivated by some inner doggy eternal search for comfort. 

So that’s it in a nutshell.  When I’m not being intentional, I want to be instinctual when I retire.  I want to be a disciplined writer ( painter, tatter) and then down tools and experience my world again with the innocence of a five year old for the rest of the day till it’s time to check the fridge, utter a curse, and set off in a temper to the supermarket for something to prepare for dinner.  Like a part time dog, I want to partially have no sense of time.    I want to walk only a few feet away from a focus on accomplishing things, and only for part of the day.  Ha.  It becomes painfully obvious that a person can either be a person, or a dog, but not both.  Once one has left paradise, innocence about clocks is gone forever.   I guess I could spend the first, say, three months when I retire being a dog, just to see if I can break the time habit.  But then, how is that different from being in my pyjamas for three months?