#TwoBits: Sometimes it is better to let the noise clear

I’ve been officially retired a few years now.

Not by choice, but by illness back then. I’ve recovered, thankfully, so that I can enjoy my retirement with a bit of golf and so forth. But not so much that I’ve volunteered to go back to work. No, no, that wouldn’t do.

I have an irritating friend who suggested I find some “purpose” in retirement. I started work as a reporter at age 18, and then spent 52 years pushing a pen, working a typewriter, telex, laptop, whatever, all over the world, ending up on this glorious Dolphin Coast.

Now apparently I need a purpose beyond not dying and walking the dog on Sheffield beach.
The purpose industry is relentless. They want you to travel, go on cruises, volunteer at a homeless shelter, take up new hobbies.

I find the “purpose” of surviving daily life stressful enough as it is. Take phone apps. Every ruddy thing needs a new app to be downloaded onto your phone, set up, registered with yet another password.

I am fairly comfortable with computers, but apps drive me to distraction, especially two effing-factor authentication that insists I need another ‘compatible device’ and a pin code that I don’t have!

If I struggle at 75, pity the non-computer literate 90-year-old who needs the help of a teenager to make an appointment or protect his or her savings being stolen from their bank app by some scumbag.

If the purpose of technology is to serve us, then in this respect it has failed. Technology should not make us prisoners in our own homes.

But I digress. Back to retirement. Nobody said: it’s fine to do nothing for a while. To sit with the strangeness of it. To let the noise from 52 years clear before deciding what comes next.

The retirement industry doesn’t sell silence to just do some thinking. But that’s the first thing you actually need.

F’rinstance, the other day I returned from walking the dog, sitting quietly on the verandah contemplating the ocean, and my wife asked me what I was doing. I said “Nothing.” That wasn’t quite true. I was thinking. But if I had said that I was thinking, she would have asked “About what?” At which point I would have had to explain that men think about really deep things that are sometimes hard to explain. That would have led to more questions.

But I’ll share my thoughts with you. I had been pondering an age-old question: Women always claim that giving birth is more painful than getting kicked in the nuts. But how could they know?

Way I see it is, it’s more painful getting kicked in the nuts. Think about this: a year or so after having a baby, a woman is likely to say “You know, I’d like to have another baby.”

On the other hand, you never hear a man saying: “I wouldn’t mind getting kicked in the nuts again.”
So you see, approached the right way, doing nothing clears the mind of distractions and allows pure, straightforward thinking.