(Life) Laundry Day!

As I pegged out the now sweet smelling laundry after our wonderful holiday I realised this is also 'LIFE laundry day'! 

It really is the first day of the rest of my life.

I 'retired' from work last year, albeit a bit earlier than the norm, for which I am very grateful.  There has always been a ton of things I was going to do 'when I retire' but then when I got to that day, pretty much everything seemed to go on hold until 'after the wedding' i.e. my second daughter's wedding in late March this year.  There seemed to be so much to do in preparation for what turned out to be a golden day.

Then we decided we would like to take a holiday - a lovely short cruise in the Eastern Med (it was great!),  so everything became 'after the holiday',  Due to the serious illness of a friend and our wish to spend time with them, we pulled forward our motorhome trip to Scotland so that we could visit our friend en route.  So everything became 'after the Scottish trip'.

So today is 'after the Scottish trip'.

This means it's time to sort my life out properly and to work out what retirement looks like on the 'day to day'; how to best use my time, talents and interests; how to be the best version of myself without the previous pulls of my working life and the various 'semi-excuses' I've found for not sorting myself out since I retired.

So as I pegged out my washing (please be impressed, I'm on load 5 now) I realise today is the day I start to take a long hard look at things.  I need to examine my values, work out what's really important and, I think, establish a proper structure to my retired life.  I already volunteer one day each week for a national organisation - giving something back and not being totally self absorbed is important to me - so now I need to work through how much of life is 'doing jobs' (protestant work ethic coming into play here) and how much of it can be what I consider to be 'fun' / self-indulgent.

Ho hum.  Watch this space as my thoughts go for a short-spin in my life laundry process.