Time to Play Again

I’m reading a book about aging, The Girls with Grandmother Faces by Frances Weaver. The book isn’t about getting “old”; it’s about aging, something that happens to us from the day we are born.

I am retired now. Not to say that I don’t work, I do. I work on painting the house inside and out; I work on landscaping and maintaining the yard; I work at maintaining my other house and wondering whether the expenditure of effort and money is balanced by the fact of simply having “my own” house that I don’t live in.

My retirement came as a shock to me. I had planned to retire in several years, but not just now. I had planned financially for retirement day, but I was still emotionally attached to my work and I identified with my “mission” in life, which, coincidentally, had provided me with a decent living.

I’m finally beginning to adapt to being retired. I’ve realized that now I can do, and learn, all those things that I’ve had to put off for lack of time. I’m only half way through The Girls, but I’ve picked out some recurring themes:

• choices
• decisions
• energy
• imagination
• serenity (to accept the things we cannot change)
• recycle (make ourselves into something new)
• options
• learning

I like the idea of “imagination”. If we don’t imagine ourselves any different tomorrow than we are today, if we don’t imagine that our aging will be any different from our grandmothers’ aging, if we refuse to take risks and to make changes and then accept the results of our choices, then we will become our grandmothers. We will continue to do–and to repeat–what we already know.

I know that I have a lot I want to do. I do not see myself living in one house for the rest of my life. I have moved several times in the last 10 years, and I know I will move again at some point.Today I wrote to a friend who just bought a new house, that I love the excitement and the challenge of moving. I love to try living in different types of housing: I lived in a house in the suburbs for 20 years; then I moved to a condo in an urban area; then I moved to an apartment in another, but more urbane and cosmopolitan, urban neighborhood. I’ve lived briefly in a manufactured home in the desert, and now I am living in a house in a resort-type environment. I have yet to live in a cabin, a Victorian house, a dormitory, a yurt, senior housing, or in the mountains, or on a farm. I still have all those places to live before I am 100.

I know that everything I do is colored by how I choose to perceive the outcome.

The Adventure Is in the Journey. . .

Waking up each day presents me with the opportunity to decide how I am going to perceive what I see on the other side of the door. Perception is reality and so, I can create my own reality. Every choice I make is the creation of a new reality.

Living in the peacefulness of the desert environment allowed me to decide to experience the excitement of color. Without being overwhelmed by the cacaphony and hysteria of city life, I can see the subtle color in what others would call a hot, drab, lifeless environment. What could be more beautiful than the kalidascope of colors that are the Chocolate Mountains at sunset? What can be more surprising than barely seeing the many-shaded green and brown lizard as it skitters away when my foot shifts the rock under which it was dozing?

My eyes are now seeing true color. I was surprised one day after I had painted the back wall, to look through some watercolors I had done over a year ago and find that in the watercolor, I had painted the back concrete wall purple–during the landscaping, I painted it a cool, cornflower blue.

While we were relandscaping, we decided that we also needed to paint the house. Most houses in the desert are some shade of earth-tone beige. The house is a mid-century modern, flat-roofed home and its previous earth tones did little to enhance its presence. We wanted a color that would contrast with the earth and draw attention to the bright yellows and hot pinks of the new native plants we had planted in the yard. We spent many evenings sitting in the backyard and gazing at the mountains and the sunset sky beyond the house, and finally, we chose to paint the house in sky-tones. We chose corn-flower blue, silver and white.

The house is now transformed by color. And I see vibrant color everywhere I go.

I have decided that since I have painted all the inside and outside walls of the house, that I now must turn my re-discovered love of color to paper. When I was a child I loved to draw; I learned what I know now of color from our box of Crayola 64. Now, in this next chapter of my life, I will return to the colors and practice what I always loved to do, but that which I always had, until now, to put aside in order to study and to accomplish things that would make me a “success”.

In this blog, I will write about my new reality and will share my adventure with color.