8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [18] Hobby & Hope

Creativity in retirement and learning from health, memory, and letting go.

Chapter List

  • Hobby Hope

    One piece of retirement advice I have been hearing for years—even though I am more than a decade away from officially hanging up my work hat—is get a hobby.

    My grandparents were knitters. My grandfather spent his life as a mail carrier working for the the postal service here in Canada. Then he retired and bought a whole lot of cheap yarn and made mittens for the neighbourhood kids. So. Many. Mittens.

    We spend our working years being productive for other people, for our employers, and suddenly it seems as if the default is keeping productive for ourselves and our sanity.

    I write in a similar overlapping topic about being Late & Ready, the ideas of picking up new skills late in life as a creative pursuit, what that means about our expectations, and what it contributes to the output. 

    But also I find myself thinking a lot about nurturing hobbies and creative life skills that will keep me active, happy and interesting when I’m the old grey-haired guy, it’s me, with his laptop in a cafe.

    I certainly won’t be running marathons anymore, so planning on having skills and interests that fit with my age, health capacity, and the demands of the craft is a two-sided coin of figuring out what works as age creeps in—and learning to start letting go of everything that doesn’t work.

    I’m just here pondering this stuff now, thinking aloud because I know it’s inevitable, but then maybe I don’t have a clue what’s really in store for me.

    Under the category of Hobby & Hope I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Post Conformity

    The funny thing about semi-retirement is that while one is still not completely decoupled from the workforce, I have noticed there is a marked volume of indifference that I am able to cultivate and nurture with regards to the performative creativity that I once did when I was younger.

    I can paint for the sake of painting.

    I can sketch things that are interesting to me.

    I can take photos of curious and interesting things.

    And I can do all these things not worrying that it somehow doesn’t fit perfectly into a portfolio or a personal brand.

    The ironic thing, this dismissal of external validation and approval, this refusal to fit into a box for some generic employer evaluation that might skim through these works in the future to see if I’m a good fit for their open job, means that I am probably producing better—or at least more authentic—art.

    It’s one of those lessons that takes a lifetime of creative output to learn and embrace, and once discovered is probably something that would have benefited me vastly more than I realized at the start of my career.

    Honed skills are great, but voice and authenticity are the work of a lifetime, after all.

  • Health Full, two

    (Continued from Health Full)

    I haven’t quite worked up the mental energy to call myself retired at this point. I’m not, really. Folks who have escaped the waged-employee chains and can work optionally or casually but who are still not of some societally agreed upon age of actual retirement we tend to use the word semi-retired. It’s code for I finished the capitalism main game storyline and now I’m going back for fun to play the parts I may have missed. 

    My experience though has often been one of adaptation, and while my brain may repeatedly tell me that I’m way too young to be calling myself retired, my body has had other ideas.

    I’m not twenty anymore.

    I strain my back sleeping wrong. My eyes get sore from looking at a screen for longer than an hour. I really need a comfortable chair when I sit at the piano. I probably shouldn’t lift too many heavy objects anymore if I can avoid it. Sitting in the grass to sketch means my knees are going to hurt when I try to stand up again. 

    Creativity is slower, more purposeful, and needs to account for mobility, agility and maybe even time to squeeze in an afternoon nap.

    It’s not weakness to acknowledge aging at any stage of the process. Knowing yourself and your limitations—and importantly, accepting it— as you work towards anything is a superpower, not a submission, even if it often seems precisely the opposite.

  • Health Full

    Three weeks ago I slipped on some neighbourhood icy sidewalks and wrenched a muscle in my back. It hurt for two and a half weeks and I was in enough pain that I had to temporarily suspend my fitness routine. No running. No swimming. Nothing overtly physical beside some gentle stretching and walking.

    What I never considered—until I couldn’t do it anymore—was the impact a physical injury could have on my creative life.

    Sure, I’ve been writing furiously here over that timespan of practice and effort and intention, but a lot of my posts over the last few weeks have been shrouded in an invisible fog of temporary inability to sit at a desk and write for long stretches, physical pain lifting my arms high enough to play my violin, or a blur of frustration about not being able to get out in nature for inspiration and stress relief.

    And maybe this is obvious, but I don’t think we realize how important stable health is for having a creative lifestyle until suddenly we are not healthy anymore, even temporarily. Physical, mental, emotional. All of this is vital to clear the path for making art, playing music, typing words into a keyboard.

    We can adapt, of course, but shifting to new modalities to work around longer term disabilities is the work of months or years, all respect given to those who do it successfully. Mode shifting, on the other hand, is not necessarily a quick jump to be made over a couple days or weeks because one foolishly slipped on the ice.