Retirement – Taking time

If good things take time, I’ve never waited long enough to find out. Till now. Getting older is an exercise in time adjustment.

It seems to take longer to get things done. Fewer things fit into a day than they used to. Medical appointments especially. Maybe it’s because there are more of them and you have to wait longer, with nothing to do than read out-of-date magazines. I used to squeeze appointments in between meetings with the ease of the man on a flying trapeze.

Supermarket visits are even slower. I did them once on the way home from work. Now they can fill a morning if you let them, especially if you stop to linger over price comparisons and taste the giveaway samples. A slice of venison sausage on a toothpick adds flavour to the outing.

As time slows, so my focus on the wider world draws in, ever closer to home. Maybe it’s because my ability to change the world diminishes. Ageing becomes a slow loss of power if you let it; like a car labouring up hills it once flew over. My friend Fred is forever complaining that everything takes longer, just one of the gripes he seems to enjoy telling us about.

The way out of all that is to focus on the smaller things, closer to home, with the same intensity you once gave to bigger, far away concerns. That shift in attention can be rewarding.

A walk up the road that I once did in a hurry, even a jog, is now an experience enriched by things I never lingered over before: bird song, changing light patterns, wind rustling the trees, tiny flowering plants along fence lines, cloud formations shaped like art works above. The detail of it all delights.
And even though I can no longer kid myself about changing the world, I can still make a difference, with time now to consider how best to do that.

The reasons driving current crises are complicated. Consider the horrors of Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan’s civil wars, Afghanistan’s earthquake, the breakdown of the rules-based global order, the growing anti-migrant and anti-Māori sentiment. Retirement gives us time to read, listen and reflect on what’s creating this climate and to choose how to respond – with letters, donations, protests and especially keeping conversations going with people who don’t agree with us.

Next time you hear someone disparaging Māori language and culture, ask them what they thought of Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono I te po’s gracious speech in Ngaruawahia, calling for unity when many of our politicians were busy blaming and slagging each other off.

The retirement luxury of time lets us focus on the smaller details, closer things, important things. After all, you can see the whole world, said poet William Blake, in a grain of sand.