Two full years of proper retirement behind me, so it’s time for an update.

Firstly, do I miss work? No, I don’t miss work. I don’t miss the routine of it, and don’t miss the stress of it, real or imagined. To not have that five day a week commitment, to not have to go and do someone else’s bidding, latterly for very meagre compensation, is blissful, it really is.

But, more than forty years of being part of that culture has been very difficult to move away from at times, and there are moments, more than I’d like, where I start to feel a certain guilt that I’m not fully occupied during a work day. It’s more habit, more trying to shed an ingrained routine, than anything else, but I’m working on it.

I haven’t set my alarm clock, bar the occasional day, since retiring, and that’s very freeing. I wake early most days, but can enjoy the feeling of knowing that my day is my own. Every day, too, not just the weekend. In these summer months I get into my walking sessions, and use that first waking hour of my day to pound the pavements hereabouts. It gets warm in this part of the world so the early start is beneficial, but it is so nice to utilize that early time to good effect, not just to get some exercise, but to listen to an audiobook as I walk, which is about as close to multi-tasking as you can genuinely get.

I still don’t get done as much as I’d like during the day. There’s always the necessary, cleaning, laundry, house maintenance and the like, that tends to get put to the bottom of the list because the tasks are boring and to an extent, pointless. Then there are the optional things like the garden, online time (the biggest consumer of my efforts in day), and finally the projects, usually home related, that I am definitely “going to get around to”, eventually. Overarching all that is my innate laziness and the fact that really I don’t want to be “doing stuff” the whole time because sometimes, and this may be the key to retirement, I don’t want to do anything at all. That’s the conundrum that exists when you’re still trying to divest yourself of the habit of work.

I read a piece in the New York Times recently that said maybe retirees should just do nothing, at least for a portion of their day. They should do it and attach as much importance to the down time as they do to the positive tasks in their lives. I’m beginning to think that the author of the piece was right, albeit that most retirees I’m sure are also locked in this personal debate about thinking that they should be doing something, rather than nothing.

I think that this doing nothing, or the acceptance of the principle, should be my task for the next year. Sure there are things I have to do, things I want to do, and things I ought to do, but doing nothing should be right up there at the top of the list, and have as much guilt attached to it as doing the laundry, or cleaning the house; that is no guilt at all!