Sometimes people who are working, pause to think about what retirement must be like. Why, it must be wonderful: not going to work each day! Similarly, people in the northern places look at the local temperatures, say 15 degrees vs. 50 degrees and think that too would be wonderful. Just imagine such bliss!
Well, I am retired and in a southern place and I am here to tell you that bliss has some holes in it. For one thing, as benefits retired people, I am older. That means shakier health and fitness and more delicate muscles and robustness. For another thing, as all sorts of people have said for centuries, many things in life are relative, not absolute. That means that when you have had the good fortune to experience temperatures of 75 and warmer, genuine shorts and t-shirt weather, 50 feels skimpy, as Lynn wrote, fraudulent.
I grew up in an atmosphere that has been described as "lawyer-like", where assertions and feelings were wrong or inferior unless they could be justified to the point where a reasonably prudent and objective person would accept them as justified. Given even a cursory inventory of my blessings, I am confident that I have no "right" to be in a down mood. I am too well-off, too healthy, too fortunate, too well-situated.
This temporary state (it's temporary since I will find circumstances, views and activities out of it) makes me think of the book of Job. That poor fellow was minding his own business and doing so rather well when the Devil taunted God into torturing him just to see how long it would take before Job cursed God and his life. Now I see that the story could be modified along the lines of "survivor guilt", the feeling of shame and guilt that one survived a death camp or a tsunami when other, wonderful and upright people didn't. The test of Job could have been to improve his situation to the most satisfying possible but at the same time, drop a pile of grumps on him, letting find fault with his past, his present, his future, his fortune, his achievements, his looks, his pets, etc., putting him in a pressure situation. He would want to complain, would be in an inexplicable and unjustified mood to complain but simply couldn't. It would be too mortifying.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
