Retirement

The least likely utterance of primitive man must be “I’m bored”.   In between hunting for food, fending off predators and finding protection from the elements he can have had little time to indulge in existential angst. Likewise it is unlikely he ever suffered from the state we refer to as stress.   The status quo was all he knew or could aspire to, whereas stress requires experiencing deviation from expectation.

Ironically, having evolved into what we flatter ourselves is the state of civilisation, boredom and stress are ever present.  Although working can be stressful, not working, I have discovered, is both stressful and boring since, annoyingly, one does not cancel out the other.

Cursed by a company pension which is adequate to sustain me but insufficient to allow any spectacular indulgence, I am deprived of the necessity of seeking work and obliged to conjure inventive ways of using endless time.  I can muster no interest in the four Gs (golf, gardening, grandchildren and god) which sustain the stereotypical retiree. Yes, I recognise thatI am luckier than many and much luckier than most, yet relative good fortune is no fortification to the disconsolate.  Analogously, little more than half a century ago, practically nobody owned a television; nevertheless, nowadays anyone who can’t afford one is deemed to be in poverty.

When everything is possible, nothing seems worthwhile.  In the 1970s, a friend of my first wife had somehow obtained a round the world plane ticket, an unheard of treat in the days before budget airlines.  He had made it from his native New York as far as London, he where spent a week cross-legged on the floor of our Hampstead flat paralyzed by indecision, eventually simply returning home.  A perfect illustration of the tyranny of choice. The comforting corollary of lack of choice is absence of responsibility and maybe this explains the otherwise incomprehensible appeal of coach holidays where choice is willingly surrendered in return for transfer of responsibility.

The concept of retirement as a cliff edge experience where the gold watch marks an almost palpable frontier, with work on one side and the sunlit uplands of unending leisure, on the other is an outdated notion.  The Guardian reported recently that the number of people working past state retirement age, out of choice or necessity, has almost tripled over the past 15 years.  l have dodged the question "Are you retired or still working" by becoming an independent consultant, a convenient cloak to wrap around occupational indecision, but little help in furnishing the tracts of time between occasional

contracts.

Satisfaction, i have discovered, can be derived from the least prepossessing of activities (decades of office work have reconciled me to this dismal reality) so the lesson is that doing almost anything is a better prospect than doing nothing. Such pragmatism does not guarantee fulfilment, retirement’s elusive promise, but as the aphorism reminds us, we shouldn’t allow the best to be the enemy of the good.  Or, as the stern injunction of the dogooder runs: keep yourself occupied. With this in mind I have resolved to tackle the Capital Ring, a modest 75 mile walk around London, taking in the wealth of parks and other green spaces which leaven the numbing dullness of the inner suburbs. None of the starting points is beyond the reach of the Underground, so that courtesy of my Freedom Pass, transport costs are zero, and the maximum altitude achieved is 400 feet. You may justifiably

remark that "modest" is a rather inadequate adjective to describe this enterprise. Nevertheless, it is a bona fide long distance walk, even though I plan to tackle it in daily chunks, always home in time for dinner.

© David Thompson 2014