It has been a fairly long time since I've written in this blog. I wish I had a good excuse for that. The fact is, though, that while I've done some productive things during that time, I've also pissed a lot of it away.
Time is a strange thing. I've heard it said that time is relative. I think that's true, but maybe not in the way that folks like Einstein and Hawking mean. It seems to me that time is relative to your age. The older you get, the faster time seems to fly by. You know how that works. When you are a kid in elementary school the hours until the last bell of the day rings seem to crawl by so slowly that it's like the clock has stopped. Then when you're in your twenties you think that, as in that old Rolling Stones song, time is on your side and life looks like it will go on forever.
When you are gray-bearded and creaky like I am the days fly by so fast you hardly notice their passage. Earlier this year I realized that I'm only ten years younger than my dad was when he died and now I feel like that old Jim Croce song: I wish that I could save time in a bottle.
The fact that the older you become the less time you have left, combined with the fact that the days seem to pass more quickly as you age, can put a lot of pressure on you. It seems that every week some well-known person who has accomplished a lot in life dies at a younger age than I am now, which makes me realize how much of my life I have already pissed away and how little time I have left to accomplish something. It's getting to the point where I can hardly enjoy falling asleep in front of the TV anymore.
When I retired I had all these plans about how I was going to spend my time. In the beginning I retired to the country so I had this idea that I would raise miniature cattle or buffalo or something. That was in between my career as a writer, some extensive traveling and my consulting business. It didn't take long to run into reality. That stuff was way too much work and, if I had wanted to work that hard, I wouldn't have retired in the first place. So I scaled back my goals and eventually adopted my dad's philosophy, which was that it was a good day if you just accomplished one thing. Of course, over time Dad's definition of an accomplishment was reduced to things like manually switching channels on the TV instead of using the remote. I'm trying to avoid going there, but sometimes I feel like I'm headed in that direction.
So I've kind of modified Dad's philosophy somewhat. I don't try to accomplish something everyday, but I do try to accomplish some things every week. The old girl and I try to exercise regularly. We don't belong to a gym and we don't do anything strenuous, but we walk for half an hour to an hour about three times a week or thereabouts. We still do most of our own work around the house. We don't have a maid service or lawn service come in to do the cleaning and maintenance, so we get some exercise that way. We pace ourselves a lot more than we did when we were younger though. When we were both working it seemed like we did everything on the weekend. So my wife would clean the house and wash the clothes every weekend and I would mow the lawn and do any other outside maintenance that had to be done. We don't have to cram all that into two days now that we're retired, so we spread it out over as much time as we need.
Lately I've been doing volunteer work as well. I might have mentioned in an earlier post that I had been working on a master gardener certification. I've finally reached that goal. To get there I had to take 65 hours of classes and do 50 hours of volunteer work. Now that I'm certified I need 15 hours of continuing education and 50 hours of volunteer work every year in order to maintain my certification so I have continued to volunteer for gardening projects in our area. That has allowed me to accomplish some things that I might otherwise not have done.
All of this has made me realize that accomplishing something with the years you have left doesn't mean that you have to perfect some life-saving operation or invent some way to feed all of the people of the world before you die. You can accomplish small things and experience the rewards of having done something positive with your time and still have a few minutes left over to play Freecell or fall asleep in front of the TV.
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