How does one – how do I – regain a lost habit of writing regularly? I managed to keep to frequent posts through years of long working days, only to lose that pattern in the last couple years of pre-retirement exhaustion. I thought that being freed from my work routine last August would lead directly to a renewed engagement with writing. Wrong.
And no, I do not blame Covid, which removed all the retirement-filling activities I thought I would enjoy, deepening my isolation and solitude and presumably increasing my free time for reflection and comment. Instead of which I went even more silent.
My only activity that increased is nonverbal – assembling jewelry both to send as gifts and to accumulate for whenever I find a market (or someone to do the marketing) and make it available for sale.
Returned now from a four day venture out into the larger world (a road trip to visit friends near Durango) I have become aware of how much my world view has altered. Since retirement in late summer of 2020 I have not made more than 3 trips to Santa Fe, none to Albuquerque, and barely weekly from home to the nearest shopping in Las Vegas. My husband works away during the week, coming home on weekends and able to do the Santa Fe errands en route, removing pressures that would have existed on me to get out at least that far. The major energy crash and never-diagnosed health decline that followed after retirement (no not Covid) reinforced my “stay at home and do little” behavior, and subtly altered my mental state in ways I did not recognize until I experienced the difference brought on by being away and in company for several days.
I have read essays in the online newspapers to which I subscribe, about both those who can’t wait to emerge from home and resume social life, as well as those who find themselves reluctant to do so. The latter seem to mostly be described as fearful, untrusting, having lost their sense of community.
I find I am somewhat reluctant to be out and about much, but I deny that I am fearful and untrusting, and I know I have not lost my sense of community.
Instead, I think I have found a pleasure in my own company that I had rarely had the ease to explore, until now. All my life I have had to be a financial support for myself and others, to organize the household, to be engaged and outwardly focused. One very brief exception was a month when I (and my then husband) first moved to Boston. I was in my mid-twenties. He got a job immediately, and told me I should take my time before starting one myself. I explored the city and did enjoy a type of vacation, but felt the pressing financial limitations of only one income in a two-incomes-needed city. I started work so that we could afford an apartment in a newly restored brownstone.
Last week’s trip took me to a co-housing community of 24 families that has been functioning effectively for over twenty years. My friends there are college classmates. The atmosphere on the ranch (they live in a cluster of individual houses around a Community Building on 340 acres of farmland) is open, inviting, trusting (no locked doors), thoughtful and as self sustaining as possible. Maintenance duties and gardening are shared responsibilities, as are preparation and clean up from weekly communal meals, but each family also pursues its own interests individually. Looking at all the landscaped homes I asked if one had to be a gardener to join the community. My hosts laughed and said “not necessarily, but you have to be willing to pay someone to do the gardening for you if you don’t do it yourself.” Caring for nature and the land is a priority of the community.
Given how easily I fit into that group, I know my remaining reluctance to get out and about is not due to loss of a sense of community. Rather I have become aware of how challenging it is to achieve connection with like minded souls in the broader strident, divisive environment that is “today’s world.” Even in my relatively quiet corner of the country, the tensions and disagreements and deep divisions troubling our society (not just in the US) cannot be avoided except by isolating. So it is not that I am fearful of re-engagement, but that I desire the original meaning of retirement – withdrawal, absence of tension and pressure, an opportunity to live quietly and reflectively. Wherein I have discovered pleasure in my own company. Less need to communicate. And apparently also less motivation to write.
The first two are definitely pluses. Not sure yet about the third. What next? We shall see.
1eclecticwriter 