Retirement – All the time in the world

What’s the best thing about retirement? Even more than a Gold Card, or free public transport (though that’s hard to find where I live in Pakiri)? Maybe it’s something as simple as time itself. Free time to do what you never got around to doing in your working life.

My friend Fred doesn’t agree, as he spends most of his time looking after grandkids. But I’ve got all the time in the world and I’ve used it trying new things I could only dream about before.

For example, wood turning. I bought a lathe and found some excellent tutors, and produced a bowl or three; furniture making, greatly helped by the Men’s Shed team, though costly with the damage I inflicted on my fingers; mushroom growing (not the poisonous ones). I built a dark shed and some bins, made up the hay and horse manure mix, but the spores never seemed to sprout as they did in the YouTube video; kon tiki fishing worked well for a while, nightmares of tangled lines aside, but decoding the GPS navigational upgrade finished me off; joining a brass band was more successful, until the band’s progress outpaced my own.

The list of enthusiasms attempted but not sustained is embarrassingly long, but some of the simplest efforts have worked. I do a nice line in corrugated iron chooks and don’t understand why more people don’t admire them. My water fountains win occasional praise though the pumps seem to stop pumping after a while. And my wicking bed gardens boost vegetable production, though with none of the miracle crops my neighbours manage.

The hard truth is that despite having all the time I need to do these things, I may have left my run too late to become really good at any of them. Yes, I know lots of retired people have become experts at all sorts of exotic activities later in life. The retirement village ads are full of such stories. I can’t afford to find out if they’re true.

Maybe I just don’t have the patience any longer to succeed to the level I desire.

The things that I do know something about and produce what I want to achieve are almost all based on skills and interests I found much, much earlier my in life, sometimes in childhood. A love of books and movies, writing stories, relishing the company of family and friends, making things out of recycled materials.

Some other things I discovered a little later, even in mid-life, such as playing the trumpet, gardening and splitting firewood, and going for a walk every day. If you start early enough they stick with you, deep down.

And what’s more, they just keep getting better, when you finally do get this free gift of all the time in the world.