There's a certain happiness in not having to get up for work five days a week. You can enjoy turning in for the night without setting your alarm clock. You can, if you want, have a cup of coffee at nine o'clock at night knowing that if it keeps you up till two in the morning, that's okay.
You can take your shower in the morning after your 2nd cup of coffee. You don't have to eat a hurried breakfast at six thirty or seven o'clock, you can wait until ten. Does it really matter if you don't eat lunch until three? When you think about driving to the coast, or to the mountains, or to see your kids in Eugene, and it's already too late to get started, why, you can just do that tomorrow.
When you worked, and the weekend rolled around, you had flyfishing to attend to, you had places to go, things you wanted to do. "You're getting older," you tell yourself, "how many good weekends do you still have left on your calendar?" Did you really want to spend them working on the roof, digging turf out of the flowerbeds, fixing the plumbing under the sink? So when you work every day, a lot of that stuff, quite understandably, doesn't get done or gets done a bit late.
But when you’re retired, you have all the time in the world. So that roof, that turf, that plumbing, well, you can do that tomorrow because tomorrow is another day off. Plenty of time! To do that! Tomorrow!
When you worked, if you went to bed at one in the morning and got up at six in the morning, well you could take a nap after work and you'd be fine. Or, alternatively, you could just build up a giant sleep debt and make it up on the weekends. Somehow, you'll figure out how to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
But when you’re retired, and you go to bed at one o'clock in the morning, and get up at six or seven in the morning, or more likely, after your eight PM cup of coffee, go to bed at three in the morning and get up at eight thirty in the morning, well, there's no need to wait until six o'clock in the evening to take that nap, you can do it at two in the afternoon. Right before lunch.
And so the days go on. Between the late cups of coffee, the late lunches, the naps, the inconsistent sleep patterns, the lack of regular exercise, your days just start to run together, becoming increasingly chaotic and unproductive, all the while polishing the veneer of a relaxed, no stress, no work, routine.
Well, that's what happened to me anyway. But wait, there's more.
One of the side effects of work, especially work that was largely self-directed, but deadline driven, is that when you're are not working, self-direction and deadlines, even when in the service of reasonably benign purposes, feel like work.
The garden feels like work. Inviting people over for dinner feels like work. Making a promise to visit someone feels like work. Making a commitment of virtually any kind, to anyone, feels like work. The obligation to do stuff and have fun because you are retired starts to feel like work. The relentless, and seemingly endless, repair of a flat old roof feels like work. Okay, that actually is work, but you get the point.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe none of this resonates with anybody else who is newly retired. But it's what I went through, and, to some degree, am still going through, though I feel like I'm, uh, working my way out of it now.
Anyway, I made a commitment about six months ago to work on this blog and the retiree website. A commitment that I have been dodging, because, quite frankly, it felt like work. The fact that I am now writing for the blog on a regular basis, and that I feel I need to be honest about my retirement experience - that it has not been one of unbridled joy - is important to share, if not for you, for me, at least. So bear with me, I'm gonna walk you through this.
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