Is this all there is?

Going back to the OP, I've recently come across the ancient Latin word Otium. It seems relevant to this thread:

Wikipedia:
OTIUM: a Latin abstract term, has a variety of meanings, including leisure time in which a person can enjoy playing, resting, eating, contemplation and academic endeavors. It sometimes, but not always, relates to a time in a person's retirement after previous service to the public or private sector, opposing "active public life". Otium can be a temporary time of leisure, that is sporadic. It can have intellectual, virtuous, or immoral implications. It originally had the idea of withdrawing from one's daily business (negotium) or affairs to engage in activities that were considered to be artistically valuable or enlightening (i.e. speaking, writing, philosophy).

Those ancient Romans knew something I reckon! PS I wonder what the "immoral" implications were?? I think I'm missing out there!

I'm sure no one thought that! No edit facility on gransnet. We all have 'blunderwoman strikes again' days; some [like moi] more than others. And, to take my foot outofit I'd better say 'blunderperson' I suppose ....[keeps digging hole]

Please please please, reading back through posts, I absolutely did not intend to insult anyone, charity shop workers et al, I'm sorry if I appeared to.

I love the freedom to do, and say, your own thing that comes with retirement. Working in the voluntary sector my contracts always stated that I was not allowed to make any public statements or e.g. send 'letters to the editor' either in my work capacity or as a private individual, unless they had been specifically approved by the Board of Management. This was to protect the organisation from a back lash from funders or other influential groups. Now I am free to speak my mind and, campaign for my causes without fear of losing my job and being unable to support my family, or arrested during a protest when I had responsibilities towards our 'wrinklies', children and my work.

Do you remember the elderly people in the Baltic States who stood, unarmed and unprotected, in front of the Russian tanks, as having no responsibilities they were more expendable than the young people who were their country's future. In old age we can afford to throw caution to the winds and 'boldly go' after all we are not at risk of 'dieing young'

isthisallthereis
I have a friend whose age and career is not unlike yours.
She stumbled, done in, through the door of a Western Buddhist Centre.

Five years later on the top (almost) of a Spanish mountain, where she had been for three months , she became an ordained Buddhist.
She is happy, bringing her career skills to improve the lives of others.

Is this all there is? - probably.

I've always sensed a trace of wistfulness in the word 'ennui'.

Hmm Hunt, not a bad idea at all!

annodomini what a wonderfully expressed line:
"Old age should burn and rave at close of day"

I don't feel old but I do want to burn and rave! I'm always haunted by Dylan Thomas's self-destruction through alcohol.

Alcohol (and I've seen a lot of it in my working life in telly and theatre) makes so much ineffective. Would Thomas have been able to write without alcohol? Or would he have acheived much, much more?

All that's not for this thread. Perhaps I may start another one!

This thread for me is about ennui. Is ennui different from boredom? For me Yes, even if some online dictionaries give it as a synonym. Doesn't mean they're right!

Can't exactly explain the difference between ennui and boredom. Moral Judgement: I do know Boredom is Bad, we are morally to blame if we're bored. Parents told us that, I'm sure we all told our offspring!

But ennui, that's what French novelists and Russian playwrights explored. Innit?

My sil's best friend since boarding school has just been diagnosed with MS - he's 32

The joke was good

Yes; it was a good one, wasn't it .

isthis I have just spotted that joke.

Perhaps it means both?

Isthis, join your local U3A and head up a play reading group.It can be at your own home and at a time to suit you. Borrow the books from the local library. I'd come like a shot!

I stand corrected, anno.

I know that 'dying of the light' does suggest that DT's poem 'Do not go gentle into that good night' should about the father losing his sight; however,I think even the first three lines tell us it's about his father's approaching death:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377

Although having done some research surfed the web I appear to be a lone voice on Thomas. It's a long, long time since I did A level Eng Lit. - not long after the poem was published, in fact.

Burton was great but I don't think anyone can really beat Thomas reading it himself. I think a creative career is very hard to retire from. I spent a wonderful few years involved with a theatre in Cornwall - my son used to help out sometimes and always said it never felt like going to work. Sadly the whole thing was hijacked by the council as soon as it looked like being successful and the people who'd done all the ground work were quietly dropped. So that was another career change!
The trouble with retirement is that you have ideas in your head about what you'd like to do with it and then you find that either you can't afford it, or poor health means you can't travel and suddenly you've been stuck at home for days and begin to feel that there's no point in bothering with anything.I have 2 friends from my schooldays who are also in a situation where retirement isn't at all what they were intending and I imagine there must many, many more.
Obviously we are all lucky to have a roof over our heads etc. etc. But you can't help hoping for something more.

Isthis:

Wow, what a wonderfully interesting career you have had and what awful luck to have it taken away too soon. Unexpectedly too, these things happen to other people don't they? Little wonder that you feel as you do, you're allowed!

Having said that, to go back to your name 'is this all there is?' well, you know the answer to that. Yes it is. But, but, but you can make of it what you will. It's a choice. Can you harness the drive you must have had before to find purpose? Sorry, I do sound preachy and I'm excellent at giving other people advice that I don't follow myself!

I don't know where you live - I'm in Surrey. Around me there are lots of WEA classes in a variety of interesting subjects. I'm ashamed at the gaps, well, gaping holes in my knowledge of a huge variety of things and I enjoy trying to fill the holes a little.

It's just a thought. I think many people would understand your feelings and empathise. It's a sod this ageing thing!

Lilygran: I didn't know that; I'd thought it was about his Father's death and I only know the well quoted bit. Great lines although they would have to be spoken by Richard Burton

feetlebaum I did some of that transcribing for freeBMD. Some of my pages were full of infant deaths aged 0 - so many of them in Whitechapel. It could make you weep.

I never had any intention of retiring... and then, aged 60, I found myself redundant. I managed to find a year's work on a contract, but they wouldn't extend it because I was 'too near retirement age'.

It's a shock to the system all right, and to one's amour propre - we are conditioned to think of ourselves as what we do, rather than who we are. You'll get over that with a little time.

I found things to do - I maintain a few web sites for different people and for myself, I act as First Contact for an Institute of Advanced Motorists Group, and I am one of thousands transcribing Birth Marriage and Death indexes to provide a free resource for people studying the genealogy of their families. Living alone, the computer is my main contact with the world at large - I'm never short of company!

That's interesting, Lilygran. Puts a different slant on it entirely...

Elegran, it is a nasty disease, but I have it much less badly than many. Just some loss of balance, a bit of loss of sight and the tiredness. But the utter unpredictability of the condition is a hassle!

sel 'Do not go gentle into that goodnight/Rage, rage against the dying of the light' is usually taken to be about death but I believe it was about D Thomas's father losing his sight.

isthis your former employers behaved appallingly and I think, if you had felt strong enough to pursue it, you would have had a very good case against them. You have my sympathy. I hope you soon find a way of using your skills and experience.

That is what MS does - invisibly cuts people off from their lives. Then you get people saying ignorant things like "MS is not usually fatal" - not directly, no, it just selectively destroys random aspects of the patient's life, hitting at the legs, the bladder, the fine muscle control, the sight, sometimes the cognition, the concentration, the personality, a different combination for each person, who does not know what cards they will be dealt and what the future holds. It usually strikes when someone has started to make their way in life, and has a family and a mortgage to worry about, and takes a long time to be completely diagnosed. By then the whole family can be affected.

A nasty disease. But having said that, I know people who have had it for decades and are much the same now as they were at diagnosis - it is that unpredictable.