Tag Archives: blogging

Retirement – Bah, Humbug – –

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Jack gets over the line in time again – –

There’s an old saying that you die three times – if you’re interested you can search on-line.

It’s the same with retirement!

I retired from my college job in Scotland when I was sixty in 2002, but not really as I was immediately head-hunted as a training consultant by three different organizations and continued to do that until I moved here to the US.

For a couple of years I really did retire, but then we moved to Big Stone Gap and opened a bookstore. While Wendy was out establishing her health support non-profit and fighting the dragons of the US for-profit health industry, I worked the bookstore. It was a big old building, so I had a fair amount of maintenance to handle, but I had also been invited to start a weekly Celtic music radio show by the local NPR station. Because we lived in the bookstore building we ran regular evening events and had a café run by a friend. So not much retirement – –

We moved to Wytheville five years ago to a house that’s even older and has had many ‘interesting’ additions over the years and has a much bigger backyard. Meanwhile Wendy is at least five years away from retirement and still busy with at least three different jobs!

So I may actually be retired now but I’m still producing and presenting my radio show, still trying to keep the house maintained, still organizing small group tours of Scotland and finding my feet as a house-husband.

As I often say to friends who say they’re looking forward to retiring – “there ain’t no such thing – it don’t exist – it’s all a hoax!

I better bring the washing in from the line now – – –

The Problem of Pain–

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Jack gets in just over the line again – –

The title of this post is also the title of a book by CS Lewis based on a lecture he presented. In both he tried to explain why a nurturing God would allow people to experience sometimes terrible pain. He likened it to a sculptor chiseling at a piece of stone to eventually reveal the perfect person inside. The pain is the chiseling, and it has to be endured before you can emerge from inside.

I know some people who have chronic pain and who might question that analogy!

However, I am an admirer of Lewis, and this post is on a simpler level. I have often said that you can’t enjoy the lack of pain until you have first experienced it. I’ve been mostly lucky with my health over the years, so my brushes with pain have tended to be fairly short lived, but when it goes away, there is an almost indescribable feeling of relief – almost euphoria.

A recent example –

A couple or so months ago I bought a new pair of shoes and immediately felt as if they were pinching one of my toes. So I swapped back to the old pair, but that didn’t help. I even went to a pair of soft slippers but still felt the same pain with them. So I made an appointment with the local podiatrist. This very nice guy had a close look and found that I had an ingrown toenail that had caused a callous to develop. Half an hour later I walked out to my car with no pain at all.

There’s another side to all this, which is, of course the opioid crisis sweeping America. Originating in the overprescribing of painkillers and then spreading to wider communities experiencing both physical and emotional pain. But that’s Wendy’s area of expertise and research – –

I certainly don’t mean to denigrate Lewis or any others who have tried to theorize about this subject. I’m not particularly religious, although I am a believer in He She or It. But I struggle to understand how a truly nurturing Deity would not intervene to prevent the worst pain. Something worse than an ingrown toenail, I mean.

Maybe opioids are the answer, and we as humans have screwed that up, too.

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack