Evenings are like retirement

I’ve learnt a new meditation idea. We are upset when reality doesn’t match our expectations. This seems to be pretty straightforwardly true - I’m upset when my dog dies because I didn’t want it to be dead.

So why am I upset when I am tired in the evening? I think this has to do with the joy of waking up to a new day with many creative projects to undertake, and deferring them until the evening after paid work is completed. Imagine! I think, How Delightful the evening will be when I can work with wild abandon on whatever I like. How I Will Enjoy My Life Then.

And then the evening arrives, and I am tired, too tired to even cook myself dinner, and I feel that the day is gone and all I have to look forward to is a repeat of this tomorrow. (Until The Weekend!)

This reminds of the oft-cited challenge of retirement. We spend our whole lives looking forward to it, and then it is slightly boring and too much all in one go. The solution to retirement is to spend your money, and time, earlier and more frequently and, similarly, the answer to Fix My Evening Issue is to enjoy the day more, not bemoan my bemoaning of the evening.