IT'S ALL ABOUT TIME

In Bogan Greystanes, time is definitely not at a premium. This is no idle description because, to me, it has become the signature feature of life in my mid-sixties. And it’s taken a bit of getting used to. Whether you attribute it to ‘retirement’ or ‘old age’ is largely academic as far as I’m concerned.

Punters sometimes ask how I like not working and I routinely respond with ‘It’s good.’ ‘Then how do you fill in your time?’ This follow up question is trickier. However, my answer to this is just as routine…. ‘I do nothing.’ Such a response elicits confusion and I’m often forced to explain. But all of this stuff misses the point.

The challenge of retirement lies not in filling up the diary with bucket list activities or posting social media friendly status updates but in accommodating and wrangling the large amounts of free time that now come out of your arse without a grimace or a grunt. Even allowing for jobs and duties around the ranch, I have blocks of hours where severe introspection in front of the bathroom mirror can be a possibility if the postman hasn’t appeared or the washing has already been put out on the line. I don’t bemoan this situation but you have to react in some way.

The great thing about having a surfeit of time is that it allows you to investigate, look up, explore and formulate stuff and that ‘stuff’ can be anything. When I worked, thought and analysis were controlled by rigid times and, too often, limited opportunities. This fencing has now been removed to a great extent.

The establishment of the blogs has largely provided me with an arena to mobilise thought and analysis and have a crack at world domination. Strangely, whether the posts are popular or not is irrelevant. The fact that I’ve had the time to research, fashion and review the posts is what turns me on. It’s cool if punters react to them but it’s not my prime motivation in producing them.

The blogs, in addition, provide a much richer medium for writing. Two important disclosures follow. I’m not a writer and I’m not good at writing. There is no false humility in these proclamations. The only flag waving that I would engage in is the assertion that I like writing. Fiction freezes me but non-fiction is where it’s at. In reality, it doesn’t matter what area of the library or which subjects you loiter in or around. Time is the preeminent factor in the process and that’s what I now possess.

One of the other reasons I’ve realigned my attention towards blogging is that social media has become very formula-driven. A few months ago, a facebook friend asked me why I was on the platform following a meme I had posted. It was a compelling question that I couldn’t really answer and I now only use social media for propaganda purposes in relation to this blog and for a few other projects that I periodically organise and manage. The imperatives of speed and popularity don’t really appeal when one has a lot of time up the sleeve.

Opinion-giving is becoming endangered in the current climate of conditioned written reflex and spontaneous response. Homages to family, friends, places, food, alleged beauty and the past infest the texts that we encounter daily and they’re instant and unfiltered. Opinions, in contrast, need time to be thought through and articulated and they have become the mortal enemy of the status update.

Enquiries that centre on ‘Where do you find the time to write?’ divulge more about the questioner than his/ her antagonist. When opinions do take up space on the social media platforms, they’re part of a clearly defined and ‘acceptable’ dominion where anything left or right of the midpoint is pissed on or, in the facebook process, ignored. This is a theme that I’ve introduced in an earlier post. Time IS at a premium in Zuckerberg Land and recent intelligence suggests it attracts a premium price.

However, I’m not immune from recognising the irony of sprouting philosophies about surplus time when Big Dog has commenced growling out in the back room. Charles Caleb Colton once wrote about ‘age’……. If life has been termed a feast, those favoured few (i.e. the aged) are the most fortunate guests, who are not compelled to sit at the table when they can no longer partake of the banquet. If the law of diminishing returns holds true, time may be something that I’ll soon have to take much more seriously. Perhaps…..when I’m 64.