Self Improvement for the Retired

Ok.  I’ve had a whole week without any work to go to.  So now I’m trying to get used to being retired again.  It’s not that easy.  Being retired turns out to be a little like a constant New Years resolution.  Now that I’m not working, I think, I’ll have time to become the better person I always wanted to be.  So far I have meditation, a weight lifting program for my bum knee, a daily 10,000 steps (which turns out to take an hour and a half to do, provided most of that hour is not spent in a coffee shop) and interval training on the bike every other day, which the New York Times health section is currently saying is a must.  And I'll have to squeeze in yoga on the in-between days.  But I see that that program is barely complete. 

Apparently I need to do a daily art exercise, according to the monthly paper I get from our local art store.  And my band mates suggested I actually practice before I come to band every week if I’m going to insist on playing the drum.   And I can’t think where or how I will ever learn to play Chopin on the piano. ( I am somewhat impeded by not being able to play the piano at all and have had a life-long inability to read music, even though everyone around me including my 14 year old grandson says it’s perfectly simple.)

So, whereas I always thought retirement would see me happily bio-degrading, with my feet up by the fire with a good book and lots of tea, I haven’t read a thing except the paper, and that before breakfast to get it out of the way and clear the rest of my day for self improvement.    I keep taking books out of the library, because I love being able to go to the library in the middle of the day, and then eventually I take them back unread, and pay the fines, and get some more. 

On my way to the library I pass the other coffee shop, the one that isn’t Starbucks, and I see the place heaving with happy seniors all sitting together in clumps talking and drinking coffee without any sense of urgency about the need to self-improve.  What must that be like? I ask myself.  Their self-improvement list probably has hippy stuff on it like “spend more time with friends at independent coffee shop, work in the garden when it’s not raining, read books by the fire...”

Obviously I’m a little envious, I won’t lie.  In fact I’ve always envied people who can relax and not feel they’re letting the side down if they stay completely unimproved.

Clearly I need to learn to use Excel, something that eluded me my whole working life, to make a spreadsheet so I can check off my daily improvements.  Think how smug I will be, soaking wet and victoriously putting a ‘check’ next to ’10,000 steps’ while the rest of the retirees are having a laugh with their pals inside a warm, snug independent coffee shop, not wondering where the day had gone.

But here’s the problem.  For some reason I’m not improving at the rate I’d hoped.   I have the list, and I have what appears to be a whole day ahead of me, and by the end of the day I’ve barely done two things on it.  Why?  A forensic analysis of my day includes things like;

- met friend at grocery store and we talked for over an hour in the pasta aisle, annoying everyone who was trying to reach for the spaghettini.  

-Arrived home, found re-run of “Miss Fisher” which I missed.  

-Saw great recipe for scones on re-run of America’s Test Kitchen.  

-Made scones.  

-Ate scones by fire with husband. 

-Dinner time.  Day shot.  

 Later, in my lounger, with a glass of wine, watching American Idol in a state of complete unimprovement, I hold my glass out to my husband for a touch up. “J-Lo is right.  She was pretty pitchy,” I comment.  

She should practice every day.  She'd soon improve.

What happens when you go back to work....

Weekends have become weekends again.  That combination of delight that there’s no work, and frenzy to get to the library before it closes.  The languid desire to stay in pyjamas all day, and the grim realization that there’s no food and you have to go to Costco. Now.  Because your week days are shot.   That’s what work does to a person.  Mind you, I’ve only been working for two weeks, and barring disasters I‘ll soon back to my indolent pink fluffy bathrobe life style.  But I dropped some papers off at the office on Friday and I confess I didn’t like the way the paymaster, who was standing desperately next to a pile of disheveled paperwork as tall as a sturdy three year old, looked up and said, “You.  Thank God!”

If I’m honest, I went back for a little stint of work to be helpful, of course, but mainly because, like Everest, it is there.  Like hanging over the edge of the Grand Canyon, to get a thrill of horror; it  reminds me  that I’m not like these people.  I look around me at the office and calculate how long they have to go before retirement.  ‘poor bastards…’ I murmur to myself.

But then, as it will, it got out of hand.  When my little six day office job was finished, a vice principal in a local high school broke her ankle.  “Would you, Iona? Only the poor principal is there by himself…” and suddenly I find myself at a little six day job at a school.

I’m horrified by how I have been swept back in.  That’s the truth.  Especially at school.  There are kids who need things, there’s staff who aren’t sure how to proceed…there’s things I know, and I can do.  It makes me realize that I walked out of my job absolutely chock full of knowledge and experience, and I honestly thought I could just put it in a cardboard box and throw it in storage until ten years from now when we would open the door and say, “this old stuff…I haven’t used it for years, let’s chuck it.”

Yesterday was my last day.  The Vice Principal is back with a boot on and stumps around like the queen of spades…enough to scare anyone into good behavior, so I’m no longer needed, but as I’m going out the door with a song in my heart, the Principal catches me, “say, you wouldn’t…?”  “No”, I say, “I wouldn’t.”

It’s hard to let go of the notion that you need to pull your weight.  I only had to go in for a couple of hours yesterday. By 1 in the afternoon  I was contemplating a glass of pino grigio on a sun-filled greenhouse patio of a local restaurant and feeling a little furtive. It’s no good telling myself that I pulled my weight for 46 years.  I feel like I ought to be doing something now, when I’m smarter.  “You write blogs,” says my husband, “heck, you write books.  And someone has to sustain the Italian wine industry with these 12 dollar glasses of wine.  They don’t pay for themselves, you know.”  A rather pointed remark, I thought, that, as it was accompanied by his pointing to the 3 dollar price tag on his glass of ale on the bill. 

“You’re right, of course,” I say sweetly, “as always.”  I take off my jacket and sit back down, signaling the waitress. “Another glass of pino grigio, please, and whatever swill he’s having.”  I’m going to fight this desire to work I think.  I can beat it.

Retirement, the rest, the hobbies, the pink fluffy bathrobes....the myth...

I didn’t really have a visceral sense of what ‘retirement’ actually means till a couple of weeks ago when I was at my local community center gym asking for an appointment to be shown what all the machines do.  Their resemblance to the machines of torture on display in the dungeons of the Tower of London required, I felt, some explanation.  “Can you come at 2:30 on Monday?” I hesitated and then it came upon me in a flood…of course I can!  I can be anywhere I want in the middle of the day…I don’t work!

How is it, then, that not two days later, I found myself standing in the 6 am winter obscurity of my room, drawers open, socks pouring out, rejected tops piled on the floor, trying to remember how to assemble a work-day outfit? And why do I not have two socks of any colour that match?  Why do all my tights have runs?  I thought I threw those all away when I retired, but here they are, taunting me like they did every day of my working life.   How had I put together a new and stunning outfit day in and day out, when now nothing seems to match, even if I pretend to be a cutting edge fashionista  from one of those issues of Vogue given over to ‘beauty at any age’? (those issues, by the way, always stop at 60 unless you’re a countess.) 

Because I jammed out, dear reader.  I have let the side down, I have gone back.  To be honest, I always assumed I might do some little odd jobs for the educational monolith that used to be my keeper and paymaster.  When I still worked for them I noticed that retired Principals were being dusted off and propped up against a desk from time to time.  They did a little recruitment for HR or led little workshops in which their object was to provide wisdom to Principals to do their job better, or helped out when some Principal broke a leg. 

      When I still worked I used to see these people and say to myself, “really? What can you tell me? I’m on the battlefield every day.  You probably sit around in a pink fluffy bathrobe till 11, drinking coffee and deciding if your program for the day should include going to the gym or tidying your sock drawer.”

And now, here I am; I’ve been cleaned up and put back into circulation.  Limited circulation to be sure, but the point is I have to be dressed and on my way into the perils of the dark winter morning before 7:30.  And how did this happen to me?  I got a very nice email from someone in HR congratulating me on my retirement, and saying how nice it must be to go to lunch any time I want, and then asking if I wouldn’t mind doing a teensy weensy job that would just take 3, maximum 4 days.  Of course I had just bought myself the brand new Iphone 6, with the stunning and extremely fashionable red cover, and hadn’t fully given myself over as yet to the problem of how I would pay for it, so this seemed like a brilliant solution.  What I asked, were 3 or 4 days in the grand scheme of things? 

I was shown by an HR functionary to the minute windowless room full of cardboard boxes that was to be my little office for the duration, with an apology about its size and lack of oxygen.  “Oh,” I said breezily, “I’ll be fine for the 3 or 4 days it will take me to do this.” 

    “3 or 4 days? Is that what they told you? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”  I could hear her later going up the length of the office saying, “guess what they told her??” to gales of laughter from each cubicle she passed.

    So here I am, and it’s terrifying how familiar it all is.  I mean it has none of the glamour that my job as a Principal had, but it’s work, and it takes 9 hours a day, and weekends have gone back to being busy planning days for the week with shopping lists and complete meals neatly written out on calendars.  Wait, I’m kidding, I never planned a meal ahead of time in my life.   But you know what I mean.  Frantic visits to the bank and library on Saturday, because I can’t go on Wednesday morning after all.  And it’s not like I don’t have things to do; the last revisions of my book are due, my underwear drawer is emptied on to the floor and yet to be sorted, and my fluffy pink bathrobe looks at me reproachfully every time I cast it aside in my hurry to get ready for work.  And worse than anything, I’m beginning to hear a sucking, quick sand-type  sound when I greet people at the office in the morning.  It sounds like this, “Good God, are you back?  I have a little 2 day job I just can’t get to.  Maybe when you get that one done….”

A brand new year for improvements...

I've been gone since late August, and in that time I took a two month trip to Europe, and then it was Christmas.  Why no blogs from old Blighty or la Belle France?  Blogs are for reflections, foreign travel is for eating.  I had to choose.  But I'm back now, and the misty Vancouver climate is making me all thoughtful again.

It’s January first.  My first thoughts go to what I should do to improve myself.  But these are my first thoughts every day.  I asked myself today why this day is different from any other, and of course the answer is that its name and number give a sense of a fresh start.  I downloaded a new tool for this sort of thing, called WOOP, (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) developed by a researcher who discovered that it turns out that just wishing for stuff doesn’t make it happen.  That will be a terrible blow to all those kids trying out for American Idol. 

The principle is that people who are more successful wish for things and then right away think of the obstacle, and begin to think of a plan work around the obstacle.  unfortunately my obstacles themselves are problematic: ‘bone idle’, ‘love bagels’ .  I’m imagining all these stellar people who have real obstacles.  Look at Steve Hawking, wish: to understand the universe and lecture and write books about it.  Obstacle: can’t speak or move limbs.

That’s it…I see all now! My obstacles are not big enough. You notice that an obstacle I listed for losing weight is ‘love bagels’.  A huger obstacle would be ‘love donuts’, only I hate donuts.  It hardly seems worth trying to overcome a bagel.

Another one of my goals was to meditate a few minutes each day.  On the days I do it I always feel more centred, and don't bark at my loved ones, but does feeling better after doing it make me want to do it? No.  It makes me want to have done it.  That’s where the ‘bone idle’ comes in.  I’d rather take my morning cup of tea and settle in to read the paper.

 I mean I don’t ask much of myself.  8 minutes of counting my breath and telling my noisy, demanding thoughts to bugger off.  I have all the necessaries to hand.  My Meditation for Dummies book, which contains so much information that I am paralyzed by it, my iPhone 6 to time me (the new big one with a fabulous red silicon coat on it, oo…was that a message bing?…bugger off iPhone thoughts!) and a quiet place, and I discovered recently that I can still sit cross-legged.  Apparently this is important, because people in all the pictures do it.  

What other goals do I have? To do the physio to make my knees stronger.  I still live in the magical world where I believe that knowing something is the same as doing it.  My phyisiotherapist  has given me fabulous exercises, along with a warning that if I don’t make the muscles that support my knees stronger, they will be like sphaghetti inside a couple of years.  If I close my eyes, I see myself doing them, and then going on to win American Idol.

So why is it so hard? I’m a human, and I believe we have been programmed for 200,000 years to conserve the little energy we have so we can survive.  I’m not sure we should be squandering our strength trying to avoid bagels.  So even though I have Nike shouting in my head to just do it, it’s just easier not to.

Where DOES the time go? Turns out, I don't really care...

Well, it’s happened.  I’ve lost track of the number of weeks since I retired. A bunch.  Possibly six.  That brings us, according to today’s fashion page in the New York Times, to two weeks until Labour Day.  I had to read that sentence 3 or 4 times before I figured out what was wrong.  My blood hadn’t run cold.  My only thought was, ‘have I worn white enough? Because in two weeks I won’t be able to any more.’

What have I done with my time? I bought a book of 109 walks in the Vancouver Area, and then went on all the same walks we always go on. (our walks mainly take us from our neighborhood to another neighborhood that has a fantastic coffee place, so that we can be fortified for the return journey…I should write a book about those.) I’ve made jam a number of times…all those articles about how sugar is actually the most dangerous thing in our society prompts me to get rid of it as fast as I can.  I bought a Kindle on Amazon (and now am in a position to prove that UPS delivers only once, but say they try twice.)  I’ve spent hours buying books for my trip to Europe, and only stop when a voice intrudes into my consciousness asking me if we were ever going to have supper.

The biggest effect of retirement right now is that I am no longer in a hurry. Anxiety about being places was like a squirrel in my gut for the 45 years of my working life.  It used to take me two weeks into the summer to realize I didn’t have to be somewhere and could actually relax, and then two weeks into the school year to figure out I had to stop relaxing or I’d be late for everything. That left 2 weeks of summer that was relaxing, until the newspapers started taunting me with ‘back to school’ specials.  Eventually I gave up and just went with fearing I’d be late all the time, so as not to have to face the transition every year. 

I noticed it when I was staining and varathaning some frames yesterday.  I was sitting in the sun on my deck struggling with the battle between my inclination about how to do the job, and my husband’s fierce instructions, happily putting a second coat of stain on the wood.  I felt nothing else but the contentment of putting stain on wood, thinking, ‘well, this is a pretty sweet job. Who’s been hiding it from me all these years?’  Six weeks ago I would, had someone not been hiding the job from me, have been crippled by a gnawing and furious anxiety that I should be doing something else, that the bloody weekend (I called it that in my impatience…now I’ve only the vaguest notion about whether a day is a weekend day or not) was almost over and I hadn’t done the other effing fun things I’d intended. 

It’s not that I don’t get concerned about things.  I have more time to worry about my health, for example.  Only yesterday  I was flipping through viral videos on Facebook  and I learned that all the walking I do does me no good at all…I’m supposed to be doing short intense bouts of weight lifting. Apparently I could die any minute if I don't.  I worried about this for, what, a minute? Two?  Then with a vision of myself dead on the doorstep of the awesome coffee shop in the next neighborhood, with a rim of sugar around my mouth like salt on a tequila glass, I shut off Facebook and went back to the kindle on-line book store.  I skipped straight past the health books to the jam-making cookbooks...I've heard there's something awesome you can do with figs and alcohol.