Never had I imagined the current extravagance of nothing to do! With the exception of the occasional medical appointment and an outing for grocery shopping, the world is my own! It is however but an awakening privilege, one which expressly requires conditioning. Its unemployment is not a release from work for there is a new mandate. Nor by the way is the boon merely a product of retirement.  Indeed the first several years of my retirement were devoted to domestic adjustments and a prolonged review of paper and electronic files including the maintenance and settlement of the inter vivos and testamentary estates of my parents. What a profound peculiarity it is for me to reflect upon what is the precipitous disappearance of my parents and the equally abrupt injunction of the future horizon which I must now face entirely without them, without the joy or necessity of their approbation, as an unidentified personality in a wide open space of unfamiliarity. I have at last attained the summit of professional and familial obligation. My complacency is a confessed achievement of self-satisfaction though not without its percolating exigencies.

There is for example a simmering sense of duty, a general anxiety that reward is but the sequel of performance. It is singularly odd to proclaim satisfaction without having done anything! Yet this is the duty at hand, the direction to regard the world from a slight distance without the need for involvement but with the clamour (and sometimes urgency) to gloat over what one sees.  When I say relish I do not mean to imply that one gleefully absorbs or consumes all that transpires; rather that one savours the detail that abounds whether an afternoon scene in the dappled sunlight or an historical impeachment of an American president.

The insistence now is regard not recognition.  Sometimes the critical view imposes a call for help or the opportunity to quell an obvious distress. The participation need not be bureaucratic or especially well defined.  Instead the preferred involvement is secondary and subordinate to whatever lies on the surface above. It is in that respect a new found career dedicated to buoyancy.

Underlying this idiom is the years of experience that preceded. As the word idiom suggests it is about relating that which is “personal and private.. particular to oneself“.

idiom (n.)
1580s, “form of speech peculiar to a people or place;” meaning “phrase or expression peculiar to a language” is from 1620s; from French idiome(16c.) and directly from Late Latin idioma “a peculiarity in language,” from Greek idioma “peculiarity, peculiar phraseology” (Fowler writes that “A manifestation of the peculiar” is “the closest possible translation of the Greek word”), from idioumai “to appropriate to oneself,” from idios“personal, private,” properly “particular to oneself.”

Each one of us naturally possesses these “particulars to oneself”, sometimes uplifting, sometimes depressing, but always singular and unanticipated accounts. There are to my thinking no two creations which are identical, not by design but by evolution. I will not attempt to define the initial source of unfolding development. What matters to me – in keeping with my thesis of personal advancement – is now only “ce qui existe” no less no more.