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2025 52 Card Project: Week 30: Daydreaming About Retirement

Last week was hot and humid, culminating in a blisteringly miserable weekend. I continued to cough and felt entirely disinclined to exercise or go to work. I parked myself for the weekend on the couch in a surly torpor, escaping into fanfiction.

I found myself lost in daydreams for much of the week. I have truly enjoyed my job, but I am going to be retiring in a few months, and that is taking up more and more of my mental space. I look at my portfolio and think about the switch from saving for years to starting to spend down my savings. I think about traveling. I think about starting to take classes, just for fun. I have a new grandchild. Two of my siblings have already retired, and another will also be retiring at the end of the year. I don't want to be the only one in my family still working.

I have always been a conscientious worker, to the point where my friends have frequently joked that my employers have taken advantage of my willingness to go above and beyond. But I am starting to check out mentally.

I am ready for my working life to be done.

Image description: A silhouette of a woman sits beside a window, her fingers parting the curtain to gaze out. Overlaid: a red hammock with a woman's feet sticking out. Lower right corner: a gold piggy bank.

Daydreaming About Retirement

30 Daydreaming

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: contemplative

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2025 52 Card Project: Week 29: Under the Sun

Every week, as I go through my daily routines, I have a continual thought running in the back of my mind: what will this week's collage be about? What is at the top of my mind? What am I mulling about? How can I put it into visual terms and make it interesting?

This is the sixth year I've been doing these collages every week, and so perhaps it is not a surprise that certain thoughts and themes come up repeatedly. This week, I've been preoccupied with my ongoing cough, which seems to be the result of a terrible summer cold that has jump-started my asthma again. Well, I'm sick of talking about my problems with coughing, and I hate the thought of being an aging lady who has nothing better to do than complain about my health. And I've made collages about this subject before.

So I thought I would do a collage about my bedroom, as I'm quite pleased with the artwork I've put up. But again, I have done several collages on the subject already. See this, this, this, this, and this.

Realizing this, I felt stuck. Wouldn't I just be boring people? And that, I noticed, roused a strong reluctance in me to get started on doing something this week.

That thought triggered the memory of another conversation I had this week. I was moaning to Pat Wrede about my struggles with the book I'm attempting to write, the sequel to Emerald House Rising. "The things I struggle with the most in writing are twofold: I have a difficult time coming up with a plot. I just have such a hard time figuring out what happens next.

And I get stuck because of the paralyzing fear that I am boring people, because I have nothing interesting to say."

As I struggled with the decision over what my collage should be about this week, I recognized (again) that this is a significant neurosis of mine. I was so dreadfully wounded years ago when my best friend of twenty-five years cut me entirely from her life. In her last conversation with me, she made it clear that she had become weary of listening to what I had to say about my life.

Even now, sixteen years out, I still haven't entirely gotten over it.

Here is the artwork I have purchased that I love so much: a tree (you know my affinity for trees) that is a static silhouette on the wall that somehow gives an impression of movement:

tree on bedroom wall

I stared at that tree and I thought about the fear of boring people, and of things that come up over and over again--and then I saw the connection. This tree is an embodiment of autumn: the leaves are blowing away in the wind. Soon, all the leaves will be gone. And the winter will come and the tree will become quiescent, and then the leaves will bud out again.

As I contemplated that, my fears seemed absurd. Who would be so nonsensical as to say that because spring comes around every year, it is meaningless? Is that not what nature does? What life does? Is that not the nature of reality itself?

Suddenly, a verse from Ecclesiastes 1:9 came into my mind: "That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

I am entering the last third of my life--looking at retirement and moving toward the ending where I will have to sum it all up. What has my life meant? Does it matter that things come up over and over again? I have always taken such comfort from ritual (St. Lucia Day, washing my face with dew every May Day, eating strawberries every July 6, holiday gatherings with my family), and what is ritual, after all, but things that repeat?

This, as I said, is an inner neurosis. But because I am aware of it, I challenge it in my mind when it starts to oppress me, and I will not let it overcome me.

Yes, things come up again and again. But that does not mean that my life is meaningless, or that my thoughts are not of interest to others. There is comfort and wisdom that may be gained from seeing things with new eyes, even as they recur. And I need not be self-conscious about that.

Here is this week's collage:

Image description: An artistic rendering of a tree made out of wood, blown by the wind. Birds and windblown leaves give an impression of movement. The tree is silhouetted against the sun in a sunset-colored sky.

Under the Sun

29 Sun

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

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Thoughts on hell and karma

I know it's not hip in some circles to believe in hell, and I don't believe in the classic hell of Christian mythology, but I do believe that when we die, we are forced to go through a complete life review with no filters, no rationalizations, and face up to who we have truly been. Our sins, if you will.*

That in itself would be truly hellish, having to face up to things, to uncork all the muck of our shadow selves. We're all in store for it, I believe, to a greater or lesser degree. Perhaps children are exempt since they have so little life to review. I read a book by a mystic/psychic** who said that was how he perceived of hell, and it really resonated with me. He also said that the worse our misdeeds the more darkness we face in the afterlife, and it was only as we came to terms with what we had done and who we had been, own up to it, that we were able to move closer to the light. Someone like Hitler, he said, would be alone in complete cold and darkness until he came to terms with what he had done.

He didn't believe in eternal damnation, just damnation that lasted as long as we clung to our old worldview. I don't believe in eternal damnation, either. I think the Universe is more nuanced than that, that the worst hell is the one we impose upon ourselves, here and hereafter. I know this won't be popular with those who want everlasting retribution against people they hate but think about how awful it would be to be stuck in the cold and dark, screaming alone in a void until you acknowledge the wrong you've done. Far worse than fire in my opinion. The agony of that fire would give you little time to think on and acknowledge the wrong you have done. It makes no sense.

Of course, there ain't no guarantee that the mystical side of the universe makes any sense, but I do take comfort from the notion.

I guess I do believe in karma, but definitely not the way the New Age defines it: if you do something heinous in one life you’ll be born into horrible circumstances in your next life. This is essentially victim-blaming, and I reject it utterly. The Eastern concept of karma is more nuanced (and if I’ve gotten what follows wrong, I’d be very happy if someone corrected me): if you do something heinous in one life, you have the opportunity to make amends and change your ways in the same life, but if you don’t you will be born over and over again into the same circumstances, living out the same patterns until you learn to break free of them. That’s somewhat more palatable, but it doesn’t have enough retribution for my liking. (So, I will probably have to mend my ways and get rid of my need for retribution along the line somewhere.)

All this is just my own eccentric take on things, borrowed here and there from various mystical and religious texts. My own personal gnosis, if you will. It may not be pagan enough for someone who calls herself a pagan, but there it is.

I've been trying to do some of that reconciliation work on this side of the divide, acknowledging my past misdeeds, stripping away as much rationalization and excuses as possible. You know, dealing with my shadow side here rather than there. It isn’t easy and it's very uncomfortable sometimes but when I do accomplish it, it's quite liberating. I feel myself inching microscopically closer to the light.

*What is sin? I don’t think it’s about having sex outside “permitted” channels, or self-identity, or sloth, or any of the other minor venalities of conventional hell and brimstone religions. To me, sin is about doing physical, mental, or emotional harm to fellow creatures and the planet.

**I want to say it was George Anderson’s Lessons from the Light but it was a long time ago and I can’t be sure. I downloaded a Kindle sample and read the start of the book and it seems like the one but, as I say, it was a long time ago.