The year of being sixty two: in and out of the comfort zone

As we get older, if we are lucky,  we live a life that suits us.  We find our tribe, we settle into our interests, we create our world from our family and friends.  We know what we like.  We know how we want to spend our time and what simply does not interest us.  We build a world around us in which we feel safe and happy.  When I look back at how life felt for me when I was in my late teens particularly so much of what I remember is the discomfort of not quite fitting and of not quite knowing how to behave.  I spent time with people whose values I did not share.  I did things I did not enjoy simply to fit in.  And then I slowly began to learn who I was and what mattered to me and to make my world in that shape.

It is good to have made a life that fits you and to feel comfortable and happy within it but I have been thinking for the last few weeks about comfort and challenge, about the need for self care and the risk of complacency, about how to continue to be true to yourself without becoming so rigid that you are not really alive.  It is a tricky one.  The train of thought started in one of my Welsh classes where the sparky, funny, intelligent and interesting people I was talking to (or trying to talk to, in my inadequate Welsh) both confessed that they had given up watching the news on television.  I was surprised.  I suppose I am a news addict and on most days I will listen to the radio news, watch the television news and quite often read a newspaper as well.  I do understand the decision to distance yourself from the news when so much of it is so deeply depressing and disturbing and outside of your power to ameliorate.  Indeed sometimes I too take a day  or so off from the news when I can feel it threatening to overwhelm me.  My friends were not uncaring or uninterested.  They simply said that they felt better in themselves if they did not subject themselves to the flood of information and the images of distress and disaster.  I understand that so why do I not do it myself?  I seem to feel a compulsion and an obligation to know what is happening in the wider world.  Parts of this are rational and reflect a belief that the intelligent citizen should know what is going on in his or her society.  Part of it is simply habit I think.  And at what point does that need to know sensibly stop?  Should I know what is happening in the United States, in the Middle East, in China, Australasia and South America?  Should I draw the boundaries of my responsibility to know around Europe?  And why the sense of a responsibility to know at all?  Can I do anything about the UK election result or the refugees from the conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan?  Can I affect what is happening in the United States under Trump? No.

Unanswerable questions in so many ways.  And then my sister reminded me that my mother, a news addict like myself for most of her life, had withdrawn from watching the news as part of her own commitment to looking after herself as my father's illness developed and the pressures on her increased.  She stopped watching anything distressing on the television entirely and stopped reading anything that distressed her after a lifetime of fascination with literature.  I don't mean that she stopped reading.  I can't imagine her life without books in it.  But she stopped reading things that disturbed and distressed her.  She read fewer novels and more biography and nature writing and abandoned her passion for current affairs.  She lost none of her incisive, quiet intelligence and maintained her calm and cheerfulness.  Is that how she managed it?  I can sort of recognise the beginnings of that shift in reading material in myself.  I certainly read less "serious" fiction than I used to and more history and writing on the natural world.  Is that part of keeping my equilibrium?  It feels to me to be to do with making sense of the big questions of life and ageing and seeking to understand what has gone before me and how other people have dealt with life.

I can feel a whole series of questions bubbling away about the balance between comfort and challenge, familiarity and strangeness, routine and novelty.  We are about to go flotilla sailing for the first time in twelve years so that feels well and truly outside my comfort zone!  Maybe that is partly why I find myself aware of the tension between what is easy and what is hard.

What about you? What do you watch, listen to and read?  What works for you and where do you stand?  In or out of the comfort zone?