My retirement seven years ago, when I was sixty-one, wasn’t a spontaneous thing. I had a plan. I thought I knew what I wanted and how to get it. I wasn’t going to work anymore. I was going to return home to England and my wife and I would spend months of each year travelling around Europe in a leisurely way, allowing ourselves weeks rather than days to get to the feel of a place. It was a good plan. One I was looking forward to putting into practice.

Hah! That should have been enough to tell me that it was never going to happen.

I did stop working, although it took me more than a year to get used to the idea that I had no deadlines, no calls I had to rush back from lunch to take and absolutely no need to get on the first plane out to a foreign city. I did move back to England.

BUT my retirement plan hadn’t factored in the impact of COVID and BREXIT and a European war would have on travel. I should have predicted that climate change would make parts of southern Europe unpleasant to be in during the summer and that the BREXIT-driven shrinkage of the UK economy would make it a more difficult, more expensive and less pleasant to travel around.

So, for the past seven years, we’re mostly stayed at home apart from a few short weeks in France and Portugal.

In the meantime, I’ve started to understand that what I want from retirement has changed. I’m not as hungry to travel as I was. Certainly not for months at a time. I don’t have the energy for it. My appetite for other things has also reduced. I eat out less often partly because I enjoy cooking and partly because so many of the restaurants are dishing out warmed up catering pack food that manages to be bland, unhealthy and over-priced. I live in a town filled with coffee shops that serve coffee that isn’t as good as the stuff I make at home and cakes that are never what they claim to be – when did the English forget how to make scones or a light sponge cake that doesn’t taste mainly of sugar?

So with my retirement plan consigned to the dustbin of history. and my apptetites becoming increasingly out of step with what the UK market place tells me I should want, I’m faced with the need to answer the question: “What is my retirement for?” or to put it another way, *What do I do between now and when I die?“

It sounds like a big question that requires a big, dramatic answer. I don’t have that kind of answer. That’s not a failure of imagination or a lack of effort on my part. It’s a recognition that there isn’t much that I want except to live a quiet peaceful life.

I was struggling to put what I want into words when I came across a poem by the Australian poet Erin Hanson who said it all perfectly. Here’s the poem:

I Want To LIve A Little Life by Erin Hanson

I want to live a little life,
I want to live it big,
To have a place to sit and feel the sun,
A patch of dirt to dig.

I want to reacquaint myself
With how I think and feel,
To make my tea but taste it too,
Reach out and touch what’s real.

I want to learn my piece of sky,
Like I’ll be tested on it later
Nothing to need, no guilty greed,
No fear I should want greater. 

I want to sense the seasons change,
To know the chill of June,
To read my books the way I used to do,
Create more than consume.

I want to live a little life,
I want to own my time,
I want to look back glad
And know this little life was mine.

So my new goal is that “I want to live a little life, I want to live it big’.

For me, that means: spending less time doing all the adminstration that every company I buy a sevice from wants to foist upon me, simplifying my life so that I’m centred in a single place and letting myself be me.

How hard could that possibly be?

I can already hear the gods of chance and chaos laughing at me. But I’ll give it a try.