Tether-reaching
You’d think that once you’ve retired from the hurly-burly of working life you’re going to go one of two ways.
If you’re the type that relies upon excitement, stimulation and the company of people, you may begin worrying that you’re going to lose out, get forgotten, lose touch and gradually fade away into lonely oblivion – i.e. just lose your justification for existing. Your contacts with former work colleagues may gradually decrease in frequency, you then actively set out to replace them with walking tours, sea cruises, hobbies such as carpentry, car repairing, origami or aircraft model-making. Anything to stop you having to live with yourself.
However, if on the other hand you’re the type that has no problem at all being in their own company and doesn’t particularly care for adventures, or outings, or parties, or indeed occupying every waking hour with activity and interaction in case (by not doing so) they get left behind by society, then it’s perfectly possible that you might welcome with open arms a scenario to arise in which essentially you bother nobody else but by the same token nobody bothers you either.
It’s the same with that old chestnut – introvert or extrovert? The truth most probably is that we’re all a bit of both.
If anything, I’m slightly in the camp that is comfortable in my own skin, doesn’t particularly need company and would far rather be working 16 hours a day (if I am lucky enough to be awake that long) on some ‘project’ that requires hard graft around the clock than the alternative. Well, that is, if the alternative is socialising three times per day in a group and then disappearing for a house party featuring a minimum twelve people plus in the depths of Cumbria at weekends.
Over the past week – by happenchance – I have been involved in two major family occasions, one celebratory and very enjoyable, the other decidedly less so and intense, but perhaps in the final analysis equally rewarding in some sort of spiritual sense, in amongst which I have been (contrary to my normal practice) sharing my life and home with two people. Now, eight days in, I am rapidly approaching the point of mental and physical exhaustion.
It’s difficult to admit it – particularly to those currently around me – but at the moment there’s nothing I’d like more I’d like in the world than to spend a week, or even a year, totally upon my own.
The trouble when you go to stay with other people – or they come to stay with you – is that you have to be on parade, either acting the host or the guest, making polite conversation, not necessarily being able to just read a newspaper when you choose, not being able to set off to travel somewhere as and when you feel like – but inevitably in fact only when others are also up from their slumbers and have decided they are ready to set off (which may be a very different thing) – and generally always having to take into account other people’s views (and/or compromising your own) when it comes to making decisions on what you’re going to do and when.
My trouble is – and I’d be happy to admit to being a hoary old curmudgeon if this is a classic symptom thereof – that, for the most part, whenever I spend my time in the company of other people, I’m constantly looking forward to the point at which the arrangement ends and I can go off and ‘do my own thing’.
There’s a huge irony in this attitude, of course, because (about 99% of the time) ‘the thing’ that I might be doing – if I was ever on some rare occasion actually left in my much craved-for state of freedom to do exactly what I want – doesn’t actually amount to very much at all.
I suppose, boiled down to its essence, that what someone like me is really seeking as a main goal in his life is a sense that I am free to do exactly what I want … and not what other people want me to do, or indeed think that I might like to do or would benefit from, or even perhaps that they would like to do together with me because they think we might both benefit from it.
Such things are sent to try human beings, it comes with the territory. It’s funny how when all you have ever wanted in life is very straightforward and simple (i.e. to be left to spend time on your own) and somehow, inevitably – for an endless variety of extraneous circumstances seemingly beyond your control – you can never manage to achieve it.
