#Middlebury #Seniors
A show of hands, please: How many of us are doing nothing we’d planned to do once we quit working? How many of us are, more accurately, doing nothing at all?
I thought it was just me, jettisoning carefully laid plans for how I’d spend my time and opting to do … not much. I’m not the only one among my friends. Those who are ahead of me claim they did the same thing for one year. That length of time seems to be the common theme, spending a year chilling out, avoiding responsibility if it involves making plans and in general hiding from those who want to rope us into doing … anything. The suspected reason: We did too much during our working years.
At the end of the year, I’m told, it’s like coming up for air, looking around at the world and deciding to join it again.
Experts say this happens frequently, that once we retire we don’t know how to make new friends, and so on. I think they’re wrong. It’s not that we don’t know how to do those things, we just don’t want to. When it comes to volunteering, they say that the “menial” type of volunteer work available doesn’t appeal to us. But then neither does the “mentoring” they say should be the answer to it all because it would use our skills.
Once I identified this “I’m not going to do anything” mentality in myself, I decided to counter all the TV watching with a personal strategy designed to at least get me out of the house. On a big calendar I’ve made entries for things like visiting the library once a week or checking out a class at the senior college.
And when the time comes I don’t actually have to do those things. I can say no.
© 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.
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