…. so I’m 67 , which feels like the old 90 at times, and I’m told by one or two younger friends that I should be feeling guilty because we Baby Boomers are the last generation to be getting a state pension, but that’s not my concern here. My focus now is on how to get and nurture a postitive approach to this retirement lark. Some of it is great, but a lot is not.
It’s not as if I’d been doing some ghastly job for 40 years that I was dying to give up so I could start gardening or golfing. In fact, the well-meaning but rather insulting suggestions – often made by the young, or those who actually can’t wait to stop working – of taking up a hobby, joining a club or having a walk in the mountains are all nails in the coffin to me, so I won’t be doing them. At least not for a while, because I’ve started attending classes in the Faculty of Arts at my local university here in Italy.
My classmates are about 45 years younger than me, and I’m more or less twice the age of the professors but it’s testament to everyone’s good natures that I don’t feel too awkward or unwanted. A few kind fellow students have offered to give me the reading lists, one or two say hello to me in the corridors, and the professors are courteous and welcoming. Some are gifted at teaching and passionate about their subjects, and the classes are dinky small.
This week, one lecturer even mentioned almost to the word, phrases delivered to me as a university undegraduate 50 years ago (at Aberdeen University, Scotland ) : ‘all art is selection and rejection, Apollo over Dionysus, order over disorder.’ Nothing new under the sun in this case, but I’m enjoying a different angle on familiar concepts, and discovering fresh ones too.
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Out There & In Here 