I love life’s little routines:

Things like eating three meals a day. Not so much for the sustenance, but the meals somehow divide the day into manageable breaks. Without regular meal breaks a day can seem endless.

So too can a week. Some of the little rituals Paul and I have are as follows:

Monday,Tuesdays,Thursdays and Saturdays: As we’re aging we’re realising the creep of old age decrepitness is approaching at more of a gallop than a creep. In an effort restore some flexibility, or at least slow it’s loss back to a slow creep, we’re trying to establish yoga as the ideal start to several days a week. The more we stick to the routine days, the more we realise how important it is. So, four days a week we try and do our little yoga routine upon rising first thing in the morning. If we leave it till later, it inevitably doesn’t get done.

Wednesdays and Fridays: I start my days with a walk with a local women’s walking group. I love those days. Paul starts those days with a cycle ride.

So, that’s the routine parts of our weeks that ensures we at least do some exercise. We try and fit in a few additional walks along the beach in the afternoons. All to often though we forget, or allow something else to take precedence. Perhaps we’ll have to allocate a few more days to those walks, make them routine, ritualise them…. It would ensure fewer things intervened.

Then theres a couple of weekly food rituals.

Friday night is still a hangover from our working days. When we were working we always tried to get started our weekend as soon as possible. Fridays we celebrated the end of the working week with a couple of drinks, and dinner was always some sort of finger food. Knives and forks were banned. It could have been pizza, or burgers, or fish and chips, but it was never purchased take away. Part of the ritual was cooking for ourselves foods typically associated with take away. Sometimes we only had a good bread, cheese, pate’, and some cherry tomatoes, cucumber slices and grapes on the side. Other times we went all out and had a selection of tapas, cooked and eaten over several hours. We still stick to our Friday night ritual as much as possible. It keeps us aware that the working week is over for our families.

Sunday is cooked breakfast day. We look forward to our bacon and eggs on a Sunday. Not only do we enjoy the meal but it reminds us that shopping hours are reduced, and some shops aren’t open at all. Additionally, not always, but Sunday is still our preferred day for cooking a roast. I don’t know why – it’s a ritual that’s been with us since childhood, and somehow still feels right.

That’s just a few of our little daily and weekly rituals. Without them, I doubt we’d know what day of the week it was. I’d love to hear what your little rituals are? Do you still have rituals even though you’re retired? If you’re still working, do you have rituals that end your working week, or set you up for your working week to begin? I’d love to hear about them.

I was born in 1955. My mother was widowed twice, the first time before my first birthday, and again when I was seven. She was left with seven children to provide for, and didn’t have the benefit of any life insurance policy.

By standards even in those days we were considered ‘poor’. But were we? Everything’s relative, and compared to our immediate neighbours, yes, we were poor. We wore hand me downs, often visibly darned. We were kept warm at night with wool patch work quilts which mum spent days sewing from scraps obtained from a local coat manufacturer (I think my oldest brother worked there). Our warmest winter clothes were also patchwork skirts lovingly made from the same scraps. Our jumpers and cardigans were all hand knitted, often from old jumpers unravelled and re-knitted in a size to fit.

We lived on a 1/4 acre block, common in those days in Christchurch NZ. Much of the block was planted in vegetables. We looked forward to the first of the potatoes, always the first of the year dug for our Christmas nights dinner. Fresh beans when they came into season – I’ve never tasted beans like those mum used to grow, and pick when they were young and crisp and sweet. Cabbages, carrots, peas, cauliflowers, tomatoes, lettuce….. Mum grew them all. And she always found time to plant a lovely flower garden too. I loved our garden.

We were fed cheaply but well. For dinner meat and three veg was normal, with the meat being either from a weekly side of mutton, or sausages, saveloys or mince. Sometimes there wasn’t enough money for meat to go around eight people, so mum would buy a ham hock and make a thick vegetable soup. Milk in those days was subsidised, so the occasional pudding was usually milk based, either rice, sago or custard to go over a home made steamed pudding or crumble. Breakfast was usually either week-bix, porridge or toast, and lunch was sandwiches.

Mum always managed something small for us for birthdays and Christmas’. One year, I think it was about my eighth birthday I remember getting a pair of knitting needles, a ball of wool, and a small bar of chocolate. I was thrilled.

I didn’t know we were poor. To me, how we grew up was normal. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised that whilst people in those days didn’t have the same abundance that is evident now, none-the-less, most had more ‘store bought’ things than we had.

Compared to our Christchurch neighbours, we were poor. But compared to most of the world would we have been poor? I suspect not. While we were wearing darned hand me downs and patchwork skirts, and eating home grown veggies with the cheapest of meats, much of the world was famine or war ravaged, the same as it is today. Much of world had no real roof over their head, no shoes on their feet, and only the clothes on their back. Much of the world wasn’t getting one good meal a day, let alone three, and it’s still the same today. I suspect that as poor as we were compared to our neighbours, we still would have been amongst the top 20% of the worlds wealthiest.

And what’s bought about these reflections? I’ve just been reading about the low fat diet revolution that has taken place over the passed 40 years – now in the process of being completely debunked. That had me thinking – The Pritikin diet, The Aitkin’s diet, Low carbs, High carbs, low protein, high protein, the 5 and 2 (two days of fasting weekly), vegetarian, vegan, dairy free, wheat free…… the list goes on and on in our over abundant western civilisation. Yet for most of the world, food, any food is welcomed.

Food is such a pleasure, and we’re so lucky to have it in abundance. Yet we insist in finding ways to deprive ourselves of some of it. We cut out fats, we cut out carbs, we cut out meat, we cut out our daily bread. My thoughts today are that any diet that omits a complete food group (true allergies excluded) is likely to end up being debunked at sometime in the future. In our Western World of true abundance, relatively new in society, we haven’t as yet developed the self discipline to prevent us over eating in preparation for the next famine. Today, I don’t think omitting any one food group is the answer – tomorrow I may think differently, but today I can’t see any sense in it.

I don’t know how or what we should or shouldn’t be eating in our over abundant western civilisation but the words of Robert Burns come to mind:

The Selkirk Grace

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.

Food is such a pleasure. I’m going to keep enjoying it while I can (but I wish I could develop a little more moderation).

The start of this year started off with sad reminders of how tenuous life can be. Three deaths of people either close to us, or close to very close friends of ours within 17 days….

We arrived home today after attending the funeral of a very dear friends brother in Perth yesterday. Norm was only 66, and was still working up until less than two months ago, when he became ill. An aggressive form of cancer cheated him of his retirement years, allowing him less than two months from diagnosis till his passing. Less than two months – time only for him to plan his funeral and to put his affairs in order so as to minimise the paperwork for Jane after he was gone. No time for any final ‘bucket list’ wish lists, no time for one last holiday, no time to celebrate one last birthday or anniversary.

Norm wasn’t from the generation ahead of us. He was of our generation. He didn’t die from an accident. He died from natural causes, reminding me that we’re getting closer every day to the time when our own number is up. I always think of life, or should I say death as sort of a lottery, figuratively speaking. In one’s early days very few lottery tickets are allocated, but as we get older more and more tickets come our way. We could hold the winning ticket (or should I say losing ticket) at any time, but as we age and more and more tickets come our way, the chances of holding ‘the ticket’ increases dramatically.

Norm’s death has served as a reminder that the time we have left is unknown, that each day, week, month and year that passes brings us a day, week, month or year closer to our own time running out.

That bucket list won’t wait. We have to tick the important things off while we can. We have to proverbially ‘make hay while the sun shines’. We have to live life while we still have life left to live. In honour of those, like Norm, for whom life was cut short, we have to live our own lives to the fullest.

And so – we look to our ‘Bucket list’. Top of our list for many years has been the Gibb River Road. For those of you who don’t know, the Gibb River Road is a four wheel drive track running through the Kimberleys in Northern Western Australia. It’s not a place we can take our caravan. We’ve ordered a little tent on line, are researching comfortable air mattresses, and places to store our caravan for a few weeks up near the start of the track. This winter, all going well, the Gibb river track will be incorporated into our northern winter sojourn. How exciting!

And we’ve booked a short cruise. We’ve fancied trying a cruise for some time now, but have never had the time. It feels like it’s the right time to make time. We don’t know if it’ll be something we’ll like, so we’re trying it out with only a short nine night cruise departing from Sydney at the end of March.

Plans for a busy year are shaping up, a full year, a very satisfying year. It’s good to be alive!

Sometimes ‘pop ups’ come up on facebook reminding you of where you were at, or what you were doing on that particular date a year ago, two years ago, or as in today’s case five years ago.

Five years ago today I had posted that what I wished for was for us to sell up, buy a fifth wheeler and a cheap property to rent out, and to hit the road. At that time it was just a dream, a dream I didn’t think had a chance of being realised, or at least not for many, many years.

At the time of that ‘wish’, we had been working towards retirement at the age of 62 (we’ll both be 62 in May of this year). We were going to build a house on our block in Busselton, and buy a little caravan, most likely an A’van, and we were going to spend the summers in Busselton, and go north to Broome for much of the winters.

A brief summary of what evolved:

We did buy our fifth wheeler less than two years after that post, and plans to ‘live the dream’ were evolving. A short time later our house was sold, and by February three years ago we had both retired from everyday employment, and we hit the road full time, proving that wishes do sometimes come true.

It didn’t quite go to plan. We’d hoped to spend at least seven years ‘living the dream’, and travelling as homeless Grey Nomads around this great big country. Dreams and plans often evolve and change, and for those who know us well, you’ll know it’s true when I say ours can change and evolve more often than most peoples. We can change direction faster than the wind.

If you’ve seen the movie, Sliding Doors, you’ll remember that Gweneth Paltrow missed her train, the doors sliding shut in her face. The movie shows two parallel situations, one where the doors didn’t slide shut and she caught her train, the other showing what happened when she missed the train. The end result of both scenarios had her ending up in the same place – only with the right guy.

We often refer to ‘sliding door’ situations, the what would have happened if we’d taken a different path than the one we did actually take.

In this instance, many twists and turns later and somehow we’ve ended up in almost the same place where our original plans would have taken us – retiring by the age of 62, living in Busselton and travelling north for much of the winter, a real life sliding door situation.

We didn’t build the grand house we were going to build on the Busselton block we had. Instead we have bought a quaint little cottage in a similar location, only a few minutes walk from the beach. We have a lovely mid sized fifth wheeler instead of an A’van, and our intention is still to travel north to warmer weather for much of the winters.

We don’t have the savings we would have had, had we continued working full time until we reached this same stage in life, but we have enough to muddle through on.

We’ve had a few adventures on this different road that’s bought us to an almost identical place. Would we have changed any of it? No! I don’t think we would. We’ve seen a lot, yet we’ve left lots to see. We gave up normal employment much earlier than we otherwise would have, and for us that’s a good thing. The actual path we took to get to where we are now, although vastly different than the plan we had been working towards, has still ended up with us living in arguably the best place on earth – Busselton. What’s not to like about that – a real pleasure!