Retirement

 

I've been following a chap on Substack who has been writing about his experience of retirement.   He was someone who had left a position of authority and responsibility and was initially having difficulty finding his place in his new circumstances.  Someone who had probably been very busy with his work and for whom work had taken up a large part of his time.  I imagine this is not uncommon in people who are used to getting respect and obedience and loyalty from those around them and it has to be difficult when suddenly that is no longer true and for most people you are now just another being in the crowd, and you now have all this time to fill.

In my case I looked forward to retirement and was so happy from day one.  For me I didn't feel much different about my place in the world or who I was because I had always just had a "job" - I had responsibilities and I feel I was a always good at what I did, but it wasn't who I was - at the end of the workday I went home to my life.  So when the job was no longer there, my life was still there, intact.

My only real issue in my working days was with the middle management types who were often a little drunk with power and loved bossing others around.   I always just wanted to be told clearly what I was expected to do and then be left alone to get on with it.

I don't think I was ever particularly ambitious about my place in the world.  I wanted to make enough money to live and save and do what interested me on my own time and basically for the world to just leave me alone. 

I remember someone asking be once, when I was a recent graduate,  if I didn't want to pursue a law degree, or an MBA so that I could "be something in the world, be part of the real power in the world", and I just thought, "No, no I don't,  I don't want that at all."  

Food Woes

 

I have had food issues for years and the list of foods that don't agree with me has grown steadily as time has gone by.  

However, in January of this year I was quite ill with stomach things for  several weeks and while things are much better I have never gone back to being able to eat the way I did before January.

For the last couple of months I have been trying to follow a low fodmap diet and that does seem to have helped.  I'm a person who has tended to be rather unsympathetic to the gluten/lactose etc crowd but now I'm one of them.  (I have watched my lactose intake for quite a while now, but I do seem to be ok with gluten.)

Last Saturday I was at a restaurant with friends and ordered something that has always been ok for me, but they have added some flavouring (a herb maybe?) to the dish and it really bothered me on Sunday and Monday and I'm still not feeling totally back to "normal".  My friends and I tend to go to the same restaurants but I'm pretty much down to one dish I can safely order at each of them.  

Restaurants like to have interesting offerings but it would be so nice for people like me if they had at least one or two really plain meals.  Certainly in downtown Toronto it seems to be pretty much impossible to find a simple roast chicken or roast beef dinner with plain vegetables and plain (i.e. without garlic) mashed potatoes.  Or a grilled cheese sandwich that is just plain bread and a slice of simple cheddar cheese. I know of only one lunch place where you can get a straightforward sliced chicken sandwich.  

I do better with brunch since you can usually get simple scrambled eggs and toast.  Often they serve home fried potatoes with I like, unless someone has decided that they need to be "seasoned".

I think I'm approaching the day when I have to say "no more restaurants" - which is a problem since the only way I now socialize is to go out for a meal with friends.

On my own I tend to eat the same things every day.   I think I have to start approaching food less as avoiding the things I can't eat and more as seeking out the things I can eat.  

I think I have to stop thinking of eating as something pleasurable and approach it as something I do to keep my body functioning - the same way I take my medications in the morning.