Importance of being active and staying connected
For those of us who have got used to studying and working for most of the first half century of our lives, it usually isn’t easy to accept fulltime retirement. As Shelley eloquently reminded us, we are wont to look before and after – and we pine for what is not. We remember those lands of youth and dreams when we enjoyed great days and jolly days. We remember the friend and colleagues of our schools and workplaces – places where most of us spent several decades of our lives – and we feel sad because we miss the interactions and the challenges of our younger working days.
There is a well-known story attributed to Dr. Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston in Texas and best-selling American author. She recounted the story of a village where all the women used to meet every morning to wash clothes by the river that ran past their village. A time came when all the households in that village were able to afford washing machines – and the village women, now having modern labour-saving devices to do their work, no longer needed to come down to the river to do their washing.
Shortly after they all started using the new washing machines, when it was to be expected that they would all be happier because they had less physical work, there developed a serious outbreak of depression among the women in the village. Nobody could immediately explain the reason for this unexpected phenomenon. How could washing clothes in modern washing machines bring on an outbreak of depression?
Later on, the reason for this deterioration in the villagers’ mental health was identified. It was not the modernisation of their washing activities that made the women depressed, it was the absence of time spent doing things together with like- minded friends.
It was the absence of Community.
In Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, she wrote that being lonely can shorten our life expectancy. And loneliness is something that, unless we take active measures to retain – or develop- connectedness, can creep up on those of us who have retired completely.
One way of preventing ourselves from severing ties with communities and colleagues with whom we were familiar is not to retire completely. If possible – and if of course your work place, valuing experience, allows it -try to work one or two days a week in your regular job while you start to develop a new community of retirees like yourself outside your workplace with whom to connect.
Another method is to renew contact with friends and colleagues from your past – your workplace or even your schooldays – who themselves have retired and with whom you share memories and reminiscences. You may have heard their stories many times before – as they too would have heard your old stories! Usually these stories of the “good old days” get spiced up and embellished the more they are related – but they are YOUR stories that can take you back to happy places when life was young and lived carefree.
Retaining connections – or reconnecting with those you had lost touch with – is good. So is developing new connections. Starting a hobby (like scrabble, bridge, gardening, writing, learning a new language, an instrument or a subject that had always interested you but which you had no time to take up because you were so busy working) is a great way to meet like-minded people. Even reading is a great hobby – but do not read in isolation! Join a book club or a library so you can meet other booklovers. Volunteering or joining a social service club is another good way of staying connected and avoiding isolation.
There is a great quotation from Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea that I believe is most relevant to Third Age folk like us.
“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”
Sanjiva Wijesinha is the author of Tales From my Island. The e-book is available at https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Island-Stories-Friendship-Childhood-ebook/dp/B00R3TS1QQ/
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