My days since retirement have been very relaxed. I don’t fret too much about what I do or do not do, I enjoy an afternoon nap most days, and I wake up around 8:00 am if I feel like it. I rarely feel rushed. “Mañana” is my favourite word.
But I think I have recently hit a new peak of ‘doing nothing’ behaviour. For the past week or so I’ve spent the bulk of the sunny spring days we’ve had sitting on our deck. Sometimes I feel bad about this, considering it ‘wasted’ time, but I think I need to start thinking of it as time well spent.
No particular place to be…
My computer is on my lap with my news feed reader open, and I usually go through a few dozen articles as I sit. Finn lies beside me, his nose wiggling frequently while his eyes are mostly closed. Now and then he jumps up to bark two or three times at something, but he generally comes right back and settles with me again on the outside couch.
I might shift around a bit, trying to keep the sun on my body without it shining on my face. Maintaining thermal balance is sometimes a challenge: in the direct sunlight I can feel overheated, but the actual outside temperature is only five or ten degrees celsius. Half of my body can be seemingly in the tropics while the other half feels refrigerated. First world problems, indeed.
I often stop reading entirely, sometimes closing my laptop then my eyes, to just listen to the birds. There have been two or three Stellar’s Jays in the trees nearby most of this past week. One of them likes to mimic a hawk and occasionally something that sounds like R2D2 drowning in a swimming pool. I knew these jays were mimics, but usually all I hear from them is screeching- this one is a real talent, though.
For the most part I can’t actually see the birds more than occasionally. We live on the side of a small mountain in a subdivision of mostly pine-forested acreages: there are far more trees here than people. The robins are always easily seen as they hop around on the grass areas looking for their food. But other birds like the jays and chickadees generally take a lot of careful observation to catch a glimpse of.
The sounds, though, are all around us. I could imagine a collection of tiny speakers producing artificial bird sounds except for those odd times I see the feathery critters flitting amongst the branches. All that life just focussed on living as much as it can.
There are a lot of things that are very wrong in the world right now. But, for the moment at least, this feels very right.
The whole point of retirement is to have time to do the things you want to do rather than the things you have to do.
If what you want to do is be a potted deck plant then more power to you 😉
“Potted deck plant”- that sounds about right.
I have things I’m doing, and the occasional ‘busy’ day. But for the most part I don’t want to be rushing to the next objective. Checking off a list of ‘accomplishments’ feels far less important to me than just… being.