Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late……...(Beatles)

“….NOT ME!! Not late for nothing! Not me.………..I am OTG. I am free!“

Well, that is the OTG myth, anyway. I am free in the sense of the Beatles’ ‘Day in the life’ song or compared to a wage-earning urbanite but I still have responsibilities, duties, chores, routines, loose schedules but still schedules. I have a wife. I have dogs. I have machines. Gotta eat. Gotta shower. Gotta pee…..ya know?

Seriously: I have been trying to clean my shop up now for months…no time! Sal has been meaning to organize some cupboards…no time. The dogs are full-on bushy again…where is the time? The outboards need some attention….

Did I mention that we wanted to paint the inside of the house (and have for the last two years)…it really needs some attention….?

“Dave! What are you saying?”

I am saying that ‘LIFE IS DEMANDING’. The older you get, the more demanding it gets. Time demanding! Or so it seems. When we were young, we worked full-time, managed a house, raised two children, did community work, had a busy social life and even had time for some recreation. Damn! I even watched too much TV!!

That is no longer the case. Today, we went down to ‘service the boats’. After breakfast and e-mails, we went to work. Walked past the lagoon. “Maybe I’ll cut up some logs tomorrow”, I said. “Focus on the boats!” she said.

So, in the lovely, bright sunshine, we set to work dealing with a boat that had somehow gotten water in the fuel. It happens all the time, actually – condensation inside half full tanks. We know what we are doing. We can fix it. Two hours later (2 hours!) we had Sal’s boat running fine. We went over to mine. The sunshine had gone. A dark cloud appeared and it began to hail. So, we’ll do that job tomorrow.

We put away some tools, got out the wine, put away some other stuff, petted the dogs…and it was dinner time!

Think about that: two healthy people got just ONE task done and it took all day. Yes, yes, I know…..you really have to plan for the time it takes to just live life as well (and I do tend to linger in showers). I know that. But, but, but, it is taking more and more time just taking care of those ‘daily-living’ tasks and there is less and less time available for the maintenance of things and projects-for-adventure.

Fuggedabout recreational pastimes. We are too busy ‘existing’ to have hobbies or sports or even an active social life. I am for sure too busy for an active social life. Sal’s still got a foot in, tho….

“Dave! Is it really that bad?”

Yes and no. Yes, it is that bad for BIG projects. Maintenance will get addressed one way or the other. Daily life tasks get done in a timely manner (I am a two-shower-a-day guy and that will carry on for as long as I do). But I am not even thinking about building a boat or converting a bread truck into an RV anymore. Those kinds of all-day, all-week, all-month projects are NO MORE. Well, at least not for now…..you should never say never.

I am now more focused on the here and now and what-needs-doing today. Put more succinctly: I will not even start a long series on Netflix. If it says, “Season six coming soon!”, I do not even look at the pilot or the trailers. I wouldn’t start Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones and Yellowstone hasn’t got a hope.

I guess it boils down again to this:…….. time is our only real currency and like all our currencies in retirement, they are dwindling. Less energy, less time, less dreams. And that’s OK. It just means that we take more and more pleasure in the here and now. We have a smaller vision of our world but it is a good one. We have less of an attention span but that just helps the wine flow. Our money might last long enough because the costly projects are gone.

It’s a weird kind of system but we seem to be slowing down as we age and use up our reserves but we are having a fine time of it.

Throw in a beautiful day and I am not sure that it gets better than that.