PLANS AND PROMISES

Old age and retirement can sometimes feel like a welcome opportunity to do less, or, more often, to promise oneself to do only those things that one really wants to do.  To live life vividly and with personal purpose.  To leave behind the demands and expectations of one’s former life – sometimes self-imposed.  One can have yearned for many years, made many promises about this time of opportunity to oneself over the course of a busy life.  Some of these promises turn into real choices that bring new experiences, adventure, fulfilment, pleasure in old age – but some turn out to be  fantasies.  This poem emerged from a rather grumpy contemplation of my own fantasies. Reality slowly creeps in.

Renting a little cottage by the sea

Renting a little cottage on a remote island

Renting a little cottage in a charming village

Renting a little cottage that a friend has going spare

Renting a little cottage on a friend’s father’s estate

Going to meditate

Going to get in touch with myself/nature/the

Deeper things of life

Going to write

Poetry/my novel/my autobiography

Going to paint

Going to just sit and watch the sunrise/set

Going to grow my own vegetables

Going to get healthy, undo the unhealth

Get fit, get good, get right

Going to switch off my mobile

Going to leave my laptop on my desk

Just a few pencils

A paintbrush or two,

That lovely sketchbook of blank watercolour paper

Maybe nothing at all

Going to rent a little cottage

For an unlimited time

For a week

For as long as I can pay the rent

Going to leave my pile of clothes

At the edge of the tide

Only to be found living in Australia

In a house much like this one

Going to write this at my desk at home

On my laptop

The radio on

The mobile phone in its tripod holder

The to do list winking.

The dark gentleman with his reaping tool

Knocking at the door.

This blog comes from my friend, Isobel Urquhart, a therapist and artist still working, still creating, not quite retired.  Making unactioned promises to ourselves can be depressing:  then retirement and older age becomes a kind of reckoning: will I now do what I have yearned to do?  

Thank you Isobel for expressing this so beautifully.  Her email is isobelurquhart@btinternet.com 

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