Structure starts with a tether. If you're writing, there is grammar and syntax, sentences and paragraphs. If you're building, there's the foundation. If you're on a road trip, it's the prearranged visits and the map. (I don't use a GPS. My father helped map the southwest Pacific during WWII, and he trained me early.)
So what in the world is the tether for this thing called retirement? The other day the local public radio station had a 'day sponsor message': "To our wonderful son and daughter and our amazing grandchildren...we love retirement, but what we both miss most is...structure."
Uh-huh, yup, that's right, I agree. I knew when I retired (there, I said it) that this Structure thing would be THE knottiest problem I'd deal with. While I moan about appointments and tasks and meetings, I am like a four-day old helium-filled balloon without them. Trailing my string, I waft along at half mast, flowing with whatever air movements come along, aimlessly changing directions and enthusiasms.
On paper, the last four months don't look bad. In October there was that trip to Mississippi to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. November took me to South Carolina for Thanksgiving with family. In December I moved, then had guests for Christmas Day dinner; January found me in Atlanta after their snow. In a week I drive east to New England to see family and the friends I've been unable to see because of vacation-day constraints. March will be consumed with preparation for April's trip back to Alaska for the Second Summer at Camp Denali.
The individual days between those trips look slightly less purposeful. The Common Ground work (that community organization group) has proved more difficult to pick up than I thought it would; the reading schedule for the church project of reading the entire Bible in a year leaps ahead of my actual reading. Enthusiasm redirects itself. The fun of a cooking marathon shifts to the delight of new yarn colors and textures. But then hauling out the sewing machine takes the foreground until that stack of ideas calls for inclusion in another chapter of The Book. It seems as if I can't stick with anything--although why would you want to stick with just knitting when you could cook or write or sew? Could it be that I just roll with all these things for a while?
Maybe Wanderlust is the tether for a while. Maybe these are the daily activities--one now, then another later--that fill the time between trips. Perhaps in the first year of retirement you fill your calendar with those big things you couldn't do when you worked full time, and you fill in with the other little things. Suddenly the amount of money spent, post graduate school, on second-hand paperbacks snicks into place. (Helps if you remember that I received my B.A. three months before I qualified for AARP membership.)
Hmmm. Just maybe I'm not doing so badly after all. Except with getting the end of paragraph returns in "compose" to show up in the published post....
