Retire or Rewire

After observing a 12-hour work schedule as an ad professional for 26 elephantine years, slogging my hippocampus out at client presentations and board meetings, I planned to call it an evening by the time I hit half a century hoping to build a retirement corpus to cover my ageing back by then.

My plans were peppered by some grandiose commitments I made to myself: Of course, PJ will never retire.

She’ll reinvent, reconfigure, reboot … and rewire.

Well, things went pretty much as planned. And now at 51, my first ‘innings’ is over.

I’ve officially retired.

Yipee, I’m finally free! The birds can go take a walk.

There’s a sprite in my steps… a Mirinda in my eyes.

Unknown ‘vibgyored’ vistas… tantalizingly arcane avenues… now beckon enticingly from every nook and corner of life.

To be discovered. To be explored. To be consumed.

Yo man, I’m a free spirit!

Free to pursue all my auxiliary interests.

Free to fulfil all those unkept promises to myself.

Free to sit and scratch my cerebrum and think as to what I should do with this freedom.

It’s time to begin the second innings. So where should I start?

There’s a serpentine bucket list.

Should it be the guitar lessons that I strummed out of in just four weeks as a teenager?

Or perhaps the singing lessons that I quacked away from even before I got the word ‘melody’ right?

Maybe start relearning the French lessons that I had abandoned in my ‘semantophobic’ twenties.

Or read all those bestsellers that I thought that paucity of time would allow me to watch, only once a movie was made on them!

But wait, what about the various scintillating Softwares I’d wanted to learn?

Not to forget the cookery classes… the stained glass… origami… topiary, and art of living workshops I’d wanted to attend.

And let’s not forget — an exhibition of my embroidered paintings!

But first, maybe I should go about publishing a collection of my ‘vocab’addiction’ pursuits which have consumed eight diaries over the last three decades.

And last, but not the least, go youtube over my untapped talent to mix RETRO music..a’la DJPJ !!

All this while, office work was the Goliath of my priorities.

Everything else paled in the aura of its stranglehold over my mental faculties.

My square-headed digital boyfriend consumed me, consummately.

I had subconsciously started hiding behind my busy schedule — conveniently brushing under the carpet, all other aspects of holistic living — happily convincing myself that a lack of time was to blame for my inability to pursue my ancillary interests.

Now like a bolt from the blue, the façade is gone!

Time is staring at me in the face.

Poking me in the ribs.

Scratching my prefrontal cortex.

Challenging me to utilize it constructively.

And here I am, getting all knotty in the head and foggy in the mind, trying to choose from a plethora of scrumptious options.

The delicious dilemma is enervating me.

My impulsive disposition is only exacerbating the situation.

I’m vacillating from one tantalizing option to another.

This indecisive conundrum is far more taxing than my 12-hour work schedule ever was!