Flowers

At supper last night we were having trouble finding space on the table for the supper dishes because of the array of fresh flowers on the table. There were camellias -- white, pink, and red; there were azaleas -- fuchsia and purple; and there were little white wildflowers my grandson had picked for me. I've posted a picture of them so you can see. The three colors of camellias are all from the same bush. The fuchsia azaleas are from a dwarf variety; the purple ones are from the 10-foot-tall Formosas. While the camellias are some of the last ones we'll get this season, the azalea blooms are just starting to peek out along the ground. Branches cut and brought inside will burst into bloom within a day.

One of the great things about retirement is that there is more time for flowers. I can pick bunches of them, set them up in vases, and then just look at them, following some of them through their life cycle from bud to bloom to decay. Camellia blooms fall intact when they get tired hanging on; so do azalea blooms, but since they are smaller it's less impressive. The little white wildflowers will shrivel on the stem. When it's magnolia season I'll post photos of big white magnolia blooms turning gorgeous shades of tan as they age.

It's time now to go take a walk and pick more azaleas, and camellias if we can still find them. I'll post some more photos here for you.

Grandkids

 A month or so ago I described a "sort of structure to aim for" each day of my new retired life: Exercising, unpacking and rearranging, learning, maintenance, and a healthy dose of reading. I'm doing somewhat well in my daily attempts to keep up with those activities, but today--- well, today, I did hardly any of them. We had the grandkids.

How is it that grandkids can be so all-engrossing? After all, they are 8 and 11, capable of playing by themselves. There is one key reason that makes all the difference. They are old enough to play by themselves -- but they don't want to. They love to play Monopoly and they beg us to play with them. They call my iPhone from upstairs so they can Facetime with me. They find a hilarious video and call us in to watch it with them.

We have little time to ourselves when they are here, but that's okay. This can't last. Soon they will start pulling away from their family and doing more on their own. Maybe they won't want to come here during school vacations anymore. They'll be moving toward independence, and that's what they are supposed to do. So for now we play Monopoly for hours with them, we tramp through muddy ditches with them trailed by a herd of neighborhood cats, and we read books to them ensconced in their blanket fort. The day passes with little exercising, maintenance, learning, or any of the other things on my list, but those can wait. This is a good day!

Hobbies, more about

In my last post I wrote about Sarah Ban Breathnach's book Simple Abundance and what she said about hobbies. One other thing she said about hobbies made me grab my pen and start underlining. "A hobby is a wonderful way to start freeing ourselves creatively," she wrote. "That's because no one expects us to be perfect at a hobby. Hobbies allow us to experiment, to dabble with the paint, the poem, the pot, the plié."



I underlined it because it seemed to be a point I needed to give some thought to. I have started, or am thinking of starting, some hobby projects that will use my media skills. After all, these are things I had been wanting to do but never could find the time for. Given that I now have the time and wherewithal to do some projects, they ought to end up being pretty impressive, right?  It seems only logical. But I have started a photography project that will involve lots and lots of photographs over a year's time and I really am not sure what I am going to do with all the photos once I have them. The project might end up with something to show for all the time and effort, and it might not. My original idea was to just try it and see. But I have been dithering about whether I should even continue with it, given the little voice in the back of my head that says, "This should be good! What will people think if it's not?"



That's why Sarah Ban Breathnach's reminder is welcome -- that hobbies are play, with no expectation, from inside or outside, of perfection.



At work I was always proving myself. That's what one does at work. It can be hard to break that habit, to realize that I don't have to prove my skills anymore. I can do an experiment just because it looks like fun. If nothing comes of it, at least I had fun. Or, some piece of the experiment might turn out to be a delightful surprise -- but it doesn't have to.
 

As I said, I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with the photographs I'm taking. For now, I think I will just post a few here. They are not "Wow, look at these" photos that display my photographic expertise. I just had fun taking them or Photoshopping them. Sometime in 2013 we'll find out if this turns into anything!

About hobbies

As part of my rethinking of our storage system, I'm moving some of my books around. In the process I'm discovering books I had forgotten about, so of course I have to peek inside them. One such book was Simple Abundance, by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I peeked into the middle, as I often do with books. She was writing about hobbies: what they might be and where they might fit into our lives. I set the book aside for immediate perusing, because hobbies are of course on my new daily to-do list.

I already have several hobbies, but I am open to new ones so was intrigued by her set of questions designed to help people who don't already have hobbies find some. First, she said to recall your favorite childhood game or the best time you ever had as a youngster. Then brainstorm questions like "If you could instantly acquire three additional skills, what would they be?" Or "What three outrageous things would you try if no one knew about it?" You might consider the three vacations you would take if all expenses were paid. Might you include something like an archaeological dig?

"There's a fabulous world out there just waiting to be explored," she wrote. "We simply have to be willing to experiment."  I translated this as encouragement to think bigger. First, we home in on activities that truly fit US, and then we free ourselves to think adventurously, to go beyond the safe or time-constricted limits that perhaps confined us during our busy working days.

That's certainly worth mulling over -- or, as Ban Breathnach called it, "moodling." I can moodle, you can moodle, and what will we come up with?

 

A lick and a promise

I saw a retired friend tonight who commented on the fact that I had posted few intriguing photos lately on my Facebook page. I told her I guessed retirement was just keeping me too busy. She said to me what is becoming a familiar refrain: "We are so busy now (that we're retired); it makes you wonder how we ever managed before!"

Retired people provide various explanations for this common phenomenon; one is from Andrei Codrescu, whom I quoted last fall: "Hundreds of jobs that you never did when you had a more or less regular job are waiting patiently for you to retire. And the minute you do, they pounce on you." He also said a job is like a bucketful of excuses, and when you retire you no longer have that bucket.

While what he said is true, I've come up with another explanation.

When I was working, I gave a dreadful number of things a lick and a promise. Correspondence, filing, keeping up friendships, household jobs, and so many other things. I crossed them off my To-Do list as "Done," but they weren't.

Now, my list says I'm doing the same tasks as before, but I'm taking a lot longer to do them. That's not a bad thing.

In my closet, I'm not just sticking things on shelves; I'm rethinking our storage system so that there's a logic behind where things are put. Instead of crossing lost friends off my Christmas card list, I tracked down some of them and wrote them letters. I finally got rid of the dinnerware my husband hated and bought an attractive, functional set.

It is true that some tasks are still getting a lick and a promise (filing!). Some tasks (not filing!) deserve only a lick and a promise. But many tasks are worthy of much more than I have given them for the past twenty years. So I'm trying to do that, and the result is that I look busy even though I haven't added a single task to my list. But that's not bad! When I eventually choose new activities, when I consider adding things to my schedule, I want to factor in this good aspect of retirement.