The first 2 or 3 years after Vickie died, I felt a need to take the anniversary week off … I didn’t want to pretend to be into my work when my mind would have been so heavily focused on Vickie. After about 3 years, though, I could deal with a full work week, but I decided to still take the week to honor Vickie and also to give myself a week to just THINK.

So, next week I will be doing a sort of reboot. I will think about whether any major shifts or changes are needed in my life, I will read some fiction books (I read way too many non-fiction ones without mixing in some fiction), I may get back into picking the guitar (after not doing it for 6 months), and so on. And, of course, I will visit Vickie’s grave.

Bottom line is that I won’t be writing blog posts and I may even disconnect from the web for a few days at a time (beginning later today, in fact). It’s not like anyone is really going to miss me for a week, but I thought I’d let you know anyway. It also gives me a chance to suggest to you that you consider taking a sabbatical, if you are able to take one. (I know it’s hard to do in this crazy busy world, but that makes it all the more valuable, too.)

This realization came to me through a very nice email from someone who had read my ebook, and was inspired by the section on The Big Picture (addresses my search for meaning after my wife passed away). In his email, he said “[I am] not religious in the traditional sense, [but] I’ve said a ‘prayer’ for your dear wife.”

I was very moved by that comment. There is something very special to me about the fact that a non-religious person would say a prayer for my wife.

Anyway, thinking about this reminded me that I’ve received emails from several of you over the past couple of years, and I want you to know that I am grateful for those. I am also grateful for all the comments you make on my posts. Very often you provide insights that are valuable to me and to other readers.

So, I am taking this opportunity to thank you, very much!

Dutchess spent much of her life as my late wife’s dog, almost always at her side, often sleeping in the bend of Vickie’s knees at night. When Vickie passed away, I of course kept Dutchess and our other two dogs, Booger and Bouncer. But keeping three dogs, and trying to manage the jealousies between them, became more than I wanted to deal with, so I gave Dutchess to my son and his kids about three years ago.

This morning Dutchess passed away due to complications from diabetes. She was an incredibly sweet dog, a true member of the family, and will be missed by all of our family.

Update: As I sat around this evening playing one of my guitars and thinking of Dutchess, the following tune flowed out of me. I share it with you in memory of Dutchess: Dutchess

Rest in peace little girl.

With love,
Bruce

The first sabbatical was one I absolutely needed. I took it because it would not have been right for me to have pretended that my mind was on work when it was not. I took it because the emotional impact was still very strong. I took it as a way of honoring and showing respect for Vickie. All the reasons for my taking an annual sabbatical continued for three or four years.

Of course, in time, the emotional impact decreased. But, I still considered it appropriate to take the week to honor Vickie.

Also, Saturday 6 September 2008 marks the 5th anniversary of my Dad’s passing. So now my sabbaticals are taken as a sort of tribute to both Dad and Vickie, the two people who have most influenced my life.

The coming week will not be all sadness for me. There will be lighthearted times, as I think back on some fond memories. Also, I expect to take time to laugh at myself for being so stupid in overstating the significance of a lot of trivial items, while being inattentive to more important ones. Vickie and Dad each had a great sense of humor, and were unafraid of looking at themselves and laughing at some of their mistakes. That’s a skill I’ve developed over the years, and, while I don’t exercise it as often as I should, next week I will exercise it.

I will not be posting anything next week. I will almost certainly disconnect from the web for at least a couple of the days. In short, I expect to make sure I am aiming myself at the right things in life.

Take care.

Not Eating Well

The first lesson is one that surprised me a great deal: how easily we can get nutritionally out of whack, and how quickly it can devastate you.

No doubt you are thinking that this is a no-brainer. Everyone knows to eat well, right?

Well, of course I knew to try to eat well. During my first year of retirement, I ate out a lot, and generally wound up having good nutrition as a result, because I typically ate at good places. I might even have gained a couple of pounds, which was no problem because I have always been thin. (I have one of those high-burn metabolisms.)

But, eating out got boring. It became more convenient to just eat at home. The problem is: my dogs don’t know how to cook, and I am not much better at it than they would be, so I ate a lot of sandwiches. I figured 3 or 4 sandwiches a day, and some cereal in the mornings, would give me adequate protein and carbs.

Then one day I woke up and realized that I am very underweight and that I feel rundown all the time. It seemed to happen fairly quickly. Of course, I was losing weight the whole time, but it was not that noticeable until it began its exponential curve.

Now I am scrambling to add some calories to my daily intake (drinking cans of Ensure Plus), ensuring I eat wholesome foods often enough, taking vitamins, and so on. But I am not going to work out of this overnight. It will take some time to get built back up.

Interestingly, when I retired I figured that gaining too much weight would be a potential problem. So, by having a mindset on that, I was oblivious to watching for the opposite to happen.

In reflecting back on this period of weight loss (several months of it), I suspect it also impacted the quality of my thinking. I don’t know this for sure, as none of us are all that good at gauging the quality of our thinking, but I suspect it, and also suspect that this hindered my picking up on my problem sooner. I do know that the brain needs good nutrition before it can give its best.

Anyway, a heads-up for you, whether you are retired, thinking about it, or have a long way to go before retiring: nutrition really is important, and it’s easy to set yourself up so that you are not getting the nutrition you need.

Missing Work

No, I do not miss getting up at 4:30 am, I do not miss the traffic hassles, and I sure don’t miss traveling. (I miss the destinations and the people I worked with at those destinations, but not the aggravating travel.)

Work does add meaning to one’s life, though. It gives you a feeling of being needed, being part of a bigger team, a sense of accomplishment, and a level of social interaction (with good friends) that just makes you feel good.

Before going into retirement, I knew about the importance of staying busy. That’s one of the reasons I blog: it gives me something to do on a somewhat regular basis, and it gives me some degree of social interaction, although it’s not the same as working with friends. (Virtual communities can never equate to real interaction with people you actually know and who actually know you.)

But it’s a far cry from doing work in which your experience actually matters. We talked last week about how there are over 100,000 new blogs added to the web every day. Hence, looking at the broad view, if I stop blogging, it will have almost zero impact. Totally unlike my retirement from the real world, where my experience is now actually missed (as is the experience of other retirees). And, obviously I miss my friends and the feeling of accomplishment that comes from my experience actually mattering.

So what can you learn from this? For one, be sure to draw some meaning from your work. I assure you it is there if you look. Secondly, when you do retire, make sure you find something to do that gives you a sense of meaning and contribution.

Related article: How I Retired

I discovered this when I was writing an email to Steve Pavlina. He had an article on his blog about the loss of a friend, and after reading it, I decided to email him to see if he would link to one of my articles (especially the one on The Big Picture, an article prompted by the loss of my wife).

In writing to him, I felt compelled to confess to him that I had unsubscribed from his blog several months ago, because I thought it was “too New Agey,” and that I now felt like a hypocrite in doing so because I have always believed in being open-minded. (I re-subscribed to Steve’s blog this morning, and have read through several of his in-depth, well thought-out articles, and encourage you to do the same.)

Ever since I can remember, I have detested hypocrisy and closed minds. So I was disappointed in myself when I realized this morning that I am guilty of these sins.

In clearing the air and confessing these sins, there is another example of hypocrisy that I must confess to. It is not a blatant one, because I don’t think I have actually lied about anything. But, many of you may have assumed from my past writings, especially my Big Picture article, that I am a Christian. Well, I have been. And, I still think the Christian faith is the one that I most want to believe. In its purest form, it is focused on helping others, whereas some other belief systems, such as Buddhism, seem more to me to be focused on examining the inner self. (Although there is a strong focus on compassion and concern for all sentient life, it seems that the practice of Buddhism is more directed at self than outwardly. That is my opinion, of course, and subject to change.)

Anyway, just to set the record straight, I struggle almost every day to believe in God. The things that most cause this struggle are the amount of suffering in the world (tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, cancer in children, and on and on), and my difficulty trying to believe that prayers are answered.

I am not an atheist, not a hard-core one anyway. If I had to fit myself to an existing belief system, it would probably be Deism: a God who created everything, possibly even other universes, but who does not take a personal role in the creation.

I am not happy with this situation. I was much happier when I believed in prayer and when the problem of suffering and evil did not seem so big to me. I try on an almost daily basis to get back to my “former self,” but I am not there, and do not know if I ever will be again.

Nonetheless, I felt that I had to share this. It may cause some of you to stop reading my blog. That certainly would disappoint me, but I would be even more disappointed in myself if I had not set the record straight.

He and I always immensely enjoyed the times we played together. Well, we can no longer play together, but at least I can still give some tunes to him. Who knows … maybe he can hear them. If not, at least they are the sort of tribute he would have liked.

Since Dad loved Merle Travis style playing, I put together a short version of 8 More Miles to Louisville. Even though I play it with more of Reed style than a Travis style, I know Dad would have liked it.

I also made a tune up, which I dedicate to Dad: Thumbs. I settled on this title because I use a bit of non-standard thumb-work in it.

I hope you all enjoy these tunes, too.

Note: The full collection of my free recordings is available at this link.

I know nobody likes a whiner, but I believe you deserve to know a bit about my state of mind.

There are probably a lot of factors involved, and I won’t burden you with all of them. I probably don’t even know all of them. But knowing some of them may help you understand more about where my head is right now.

• I turn 59 later this week. I am not morbid about this. It is still a fairly young age, but it does mean that I am drawing closer to the end. So, I guess that is weighing on me a bit.
• I recently lost one friend to brain cancer, only to find out that another has a brain tumor as well.
• As I noted in a recent post, Jerry Reed’s health is seriously deteriorating. It appears from the YouTube video that he might have COPD, and I know he smoked at one time. This hurts me for two reasons: (1) I love Jerry, and (2) in time my condition will probably mirror his, since I have smoked for about 38 years.

Other factors include

• I am struggling to find something to be passionate about. When I retired, I had thought that I would dig deeply into theology and microbiology and studies of consciousness, since these are deep subjects that interested me at the time. However, I have pretty much lost interest in this stuff. I do not know if I can recover the interest or not.
• Other interests are changing for me, too. For example, when I started this blog, I was passionate about technology, and especially about using it to improve productivity. But now technology just disappoints me. There has not been one product worth talking about, in my mind, in the past couple of years, with the exception of the iPhone. I am so disappointed with technology that I am about ready to go back to using paper planners.
• I have worked pretty hard on this blog, and now, about a year and half into it, the subscriptions are not increasing at all, the traffic is still not improving, almost nobody comments anymore, no other blogs link to mine, and I wonder what the hell I am doing wrong. I am starting wonder why I should even continue with it.

So, that’s where my head is. No doubt my being in this rut has impacted my writing somewhat. So, in thinking so much about these negatives, I am probably not doing a very good job of writing, which is making the negatives a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, sorry to dump all of this on you, but I like to be straightforward with people. That is one thing, at least, that I am good at.

I do not know if I will write another post this week or not. If I do, it may just be about something that interests me, even if it has nothing to do with productivity or technology.

If you have any insights or suggestions, I am open to hearing them.

Update: Just so you know I appreciate your feedback, this is from my Twitter account:

• For those who are new to this blog and do not know me, Vickie is my late wife. She passed away unexpectedly six and a half years ago while recovering from knee replacement surgery.

So why do I share something so personal with you? Well, I almost decided against it, but then figured that maybe you can learn from my failures. So I hope you do.

When Vickie and I married, she was fiercely independent and I was a control freak. After a couple of years, she finally helped me to see I was a control freak. And, I also realized that one of the things I admired about Vickie was her independence. I appreciated her desire, her need, to do things for herself. Yet I wanted to ensure I always protected her.

In time, she helped me to not become controlling and paranoid, and I worked hard to find the right balance between letting her do for herself and providing a safety net for her. As I look back, I erred on the side of being over-protective. I think she lost some of her self-confidence as a result of this, and as a result of things that happen in life.

My message to you regarding this is that this might be a good time to assess whether you are protective-to-a-fault with someone you love.

And then there is the matter of building hope. I have always been the eternal optimist, despite having a persistent questioning attitude and being highly critical. Vickie was always able to look to me for optimism when things weren’t going so well. Until raising our oldest granddaughter got the best of both of us.

I gave up hope first. Something I do not do often. But, the teenage granddaughter’s taking advantage of and disrespecting Vickie, the lies, the stealing, the skipping school, … all got to me. My view was that it was time for Vickie and I to stop pissing in the wind, that it was time for us to stop trying to change the world and time for us to live for ourselves. We had given our best, and we had spent a fortune on her, but it was not working.

And then Vickie gave up, too. I do not regret our decision to send our granddaughter back to her mother: you have to realize when your efforts are in vain, and take different actions.

My failure was not giving us, Vickie and I, anything else to hope for. We all need hope.

I look back on these failures as the greatest failures of my life. I hope you can learn something from these failures, before it is too late for you. Apologizing to someone in a tomb never corrects a failure.

First off, I don’t like politics. It has become a dirty word to me. It has come to mean partisanship, compromise, saying anything and doing anything to get elected, catering to lobbyists and not looking out for the electorate, and so on.

But it is the system we have. We have a two-party system, and I think a two-party system can work. (I am old enough to remember when it did.) I do not know that either party really stands for anything anymore. That is, it can be hard to tell the two apart, except for the fact that they seem to hate each other, so one must suspect there are some differences.

Regardless, it typically means we have two people to choose from in each political race, once the primaries are over. My approach is to pick from these based on what I believe they can do and what their principles are, rather than their political affiliation. In other words, I am an independent. I am conservative in my leanings, but still independent.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have had some positive things to say about both Senators McCain and Obama, and that I have been particularly pleased with Obama. And, I still like Obama: his speeches are inspiring and I believe he is sincere in his desire to bring America together again.

However, at this point I prefer John McCain for President. I believe he has far more experience than his opponents, I believe he is a man of impeccable character, and it is clear to me that he sticks up for what he believes in, while simultaneously trying his hardest to work with everyone. That is the kind of person I would be proud to emulate and the kind of person I would like to see as President.

Okay, I am done. I don’t plan to discuss politics anymore. I am not really sure why I bothered doing it today, except that I like for you to know a bit about me.