On my calendar, every new month, I mark the days remaining till my sixty-fifth birthday. It's coming pretty fast, in 473 days, or a year, three and a half months. This is kind of a fun exercise for counting down till I can finally receive my full pension, and reduce my work schedule to maybe two days a week. I might even be able to retire completely, but I rather like the idea of feeling useful and getting paid for it, for a while longer, anyway.
What I am really looking forward to is the fact that I will no longer have to worry about getting enough work in order to survive. This, of course also depends on a couple of other factors. For example, if I can stay safely housed in my low income apartment, but I have already lived here for seventeen years and don't seem to be about to go anywhere. There is also the hope that my brilliant contract employers will not phase out my occupation or turn it into volunteer work, for a little while longer anyways.
My health could also be a factor. Even though I haven't had any scares since I had that bout with Guillain-Barré syndrome in May of 2015, which never got properly diagnosed by any of the brilliant doctors at my bedside, they did discover enough irregularities to my thyroid and pituitary to want to monitor me and get me on the right meds. Otherwise, except for the odd low thyroid day or week, I am doing fine, and expect to keep on keeping on for a few years to come.
The kind of government that gets elected in the new future might also impact on people's ability to retire with dignity, since there remain that stubborn and mule-headed base of thirty percent of Canadians who support conservative governments, and our first-past-the-post electoral system could well get those clowns elected again, then watch them make our lives miserable and less than tolerable.
There is also the impact of climate change and how that could affect my quality of life, and for everyone, but especially for seniors and other low-income and vulnerable people. There could be a lot to lose sleep over. I am of course going to go on hoping for the best, because that is what hope is. I have decided that I am not going to buy into the despair or the histrionics of Greta Turnberg , much as I admire and respect her and the many young people taking up the call against the industries of death that are vectors of planet killing climate change. (I'm not doing a bad job myself, Gentle Reader, at sounding maudlin about it).
I know we are going to get through this. Things will likely look different in a few years, and maybe I won't so willingly be taking those annual plane trips down to Latin America every year, though I still hope I can have it both ways. My reasoning is that I don't drive a car, am vegetarian, and don't buy a lot of stuff. My carbon footprint is tiny, so why not enjoy an annual flight sort of guilt free? What is a piece of cake, if we can't have it and eat it all at once, darlings?
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