There are no holidays

I remember while I was working full-time talking to my uncle about retirement. He said when you’re retired there are no holidays. At the time I thought he was nuts. As far as I could see, once you retired you had nothing but holidays. Today I understand what he was getting at. Don’t get me wrong, being retired is great and I wouldn’t go back to teaching for any amount of money. There is a weird thing that happens though. When I was teaching there were days, weeks, months that I looked forward to with unbridled excitement. The weekend for example.  At various times during my career I could hardly wait for the weekend so I could go cross-country skiing, hiking, cycling, canoeing, camping or running. It didn’t matter that I would show up Monday morning exhausted and drag my sorry butt through the rest of the week before being ready to do it all again. I do very few of those things anymore and, if I did, I could do them pretty much any day of the week.

There is a great deal of freedom to that and there is also an ordinariness that becomes pervasive. Weekends become another part of the routine and thereby, nothing special. I enjoy the traveling we are able to do now, but I don’t look forward to it the way I did when it meant a complete break with from the intensity of my work life. Part of the fun of travel when I was working was doing the detailed planning for months in advance, pouring over topo maps for cycling trips and imagining what the holiday would be like. The planning itself was a temporary escape, a mini-holiday. Today we tend to like others to do the organizing.  We show up and they take care of the rest. People often ask me where we are going or if we are going to visit a particular place. Usually I can’t answer that because having read over the itinerary, I put it on the back burner until we are a few days from leaving. I wonder if I’m getting jaded and lazy because I don’t look forward to anything with the enthusiasm I did when I was teaching.

Perhaps it’s a lack of contrast that makes the difference. I’m not usually exhausted so I don’t look forward as much to catching up on sleep. I have a lot more freedom to do what I want so I don’t look forward as much to doing what I want. I still have commitments and groceries need to be bought and laundry needs to get done but when I was working, I had to do those things in addition to meeting the demands of teaching. Now there is nothing particularly special about spending an hour or so watching YouTube videos. There are more productive things I could be doing but whether something gets done today or tomorrow is not usually a matter of consequence.

On my way home from an appointment today I stopped in at MEC.  I didn’t need anything, but I hadn’t been for a while and I thought it would be amusing to look around. What I thought about as I looked at the cycling, hiking, canoeing and camping gear was the sense of anticipation looking at gear used to bring me. It’s not about the latest piece of gear.  It’s about the exciting possibilities represented by the gear. It’s tempting to buy just one more little thing. I mostly resisted temptation. I did come home with a couple of closed-cell foam pads that we can use to sit on the front steps when we want to drink coffee and tea outside in the evening. We’ve used them twice today.  They are much more comfortable than the concrete steps and we can also use them on picnic tables when we travel in the van. Pretty tame stuff in comparison to what we used to do for fun.

I wouldn’t go back in time to when I worked full-time and along with that is the occasional nostalgic retreat to the days when there were so many exciting adventures waiting just over the horizon. Interesting how, as we age, the world around us changes and the way we see that world changes even more.