After an active life, including the travel by overcrowded public transports or personal conveyance, a professional vacuum is created. By nature, vacuum draws everything inside but the professional vacuum is quite different. It throws out lot of free time, every day of the year now, equaling the time spent away from home during the office-goers’ busy life.
The thoroughbreds would have prepared an engagement schedule and they don’t get weighed down by the free time syndrome. Reemployment opportunities are explored, personal interest projects such as hobbies, community service or post-retirement studies are pursued. By keeping the professionally acquired skills alive and judiciously mixing it with their current avocation, they easily slot the free time for purposeful spending.
Friends and relatives never fail to ask this type, “Now that you have free time, how are you sending it? The polite answer will invariably be, “Actually I could do with little more time. I pursue hobbies and social work or am seriously engaged in my second innings as a professional or shuttling between sons and daughters residences, extending any small help they need”.
The middle of the course runners manage it by hurriedly charting out a plan of action. They sort of test the waters before plunging into a life of continuing activity. This sandwich type spends a little time in envying the adaptability of the thoroughbreds and secretly yearning to join with the stragglers but ruing the lack of to do so!
For the question “how are you managing now?”, the answer might be any one of these: “somehow I am managing right now ; but in the long run unless I start looking for a job or take to serious reading or choose some sort of a hobby, it is going to be tough. A stream of envy keeps running through their thoughts “how well Mr. X has planned for a retired life. Why it did not strike me at all?”
The stragglers or the old fashioned thermometers, look at free time in dismay only to huff and puff along trying to emulate the peers in the field. They come to the platform laden with luggage of past misses, self pity and lack of will to unshackle their potential. These sorts of people have spent most of their professional life without sticking to a game plan, constantly shrugging out of it like the mercury in the capillary tube.
For the straggler, the forced free time weighs heavily on the mind. Friends and relatives offer no guidance as he had ignored them for long. The thought about not developing a healthy friendship circle starts to hurt, inhibiting personal approach. So far none of them have even enquired, “how are you now or what are you doing?
Whatever be the case, this retirement benefit is not only a monetary cushion but about earning the emotional wealth. The emotional wealth could be the satisfaction of doing something good or learning to change perceptions in the light of newer experiences.
Armchair Psychiatrist:
Pomegranate is a hard fruit to get at its soft pearls of taste. While trying to part the rind, the pearls shoot off harmlessly but leaves a telltale mark of juice on the person or on the mosaic floor, as if to make its mark. The question why nature has given it such a thick and difficult skin cover is a pertinent question. The grenade on the other hand is soft on the spelling but explodes shooting out shrapnel; injury and death are its mark.
The wily pomegranate fruit serves as a useful tool to study the mental makeup and attitude, in any house-hold. It is enough to give a person the task of separating the pearls from this fruit. The orderly way a person approaches the job indicates a patient and careful being. Little impatience and little mess left on the operation table places the person at the above average mark. The operation theater looking like a battlefield, torn rinds, dyed clothes and stained floor, tells the story of the ‘not up to any mark person’.
The bunch of banana is a different fruit altogether. The bunch is connected to the main umbilical by a arc type secondary umbilical. Individual fruit is in touch with the secondary by finger like third umbilical, which is unique for each fruit in the bunch. From flower to birth a banana, it is cocooned in a veil. But for all these complications, it is easiest fruit to peel.
One who starts to peel it by twisting its head is the one to watch – the person is in a tearing hurry and as long as the peeling is done no care is shown about the wounds inflicted on the poor fruit. One who starts the process from the rear end of the fruit is little better – shows readiness to go about the work on hand without hurry.
The best peeler is the one, who holds the fruit head down, nips the rear knotty portion and then starts to peel the outer skin, strip by strip to expose the fruit as needed to eat it; strives to do everything in a proper fashion.
Psychiatrists ask questions and lot of them. Likewise the person on the couch may have a few. If your questions are: “Why this fruit analogy and what is your success rate (might be a cricket enthusiast!), in correctly analyzing a person and why do you do it?”
My answers, again based on analogy, will be:
“They don’t fret when I peel them layer by layer. Personally I am the one to prepare them, for my folks in a ready to eat condition!”
“The 2nd question you just now asked, itself speaks about my success rate”“The last question is a bit philosophical but the answer will be practical: all who water gardens need not be enthused about the job; some do it for livelihood, some do it to show off and some as an activity to spend idle time. There is category you see!”
“The confused voice from the couch asks, to which category you belong!?”
“I will answer you but one condition that you don’t reveal this to anyone else, OK? I place myself in between the show off and idle time category”.
Wondering where it got in to, the confused voice from the couch fell silent.
“Will you help to … fruit?’ brought me up to the reality, of peeling fruits!
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