There is a great song, one of many written by John Fogerty, called Someday Never Comes. I first heard the song on the Creedence Clearwater Revival album Mardi Gras, released in 1971. By Fogerty’s high standards, it’s a pretty crap album, but there are some great tunes on it, of which this is the stand out. The lyrics speak for themselves and I post them without permission:
Well, I’m here to tell you now, each and every mother’s son,
That you better learn it fast, you better learn it young,
‘Cause someday never comes.
Even as a youngster, I saw the relevance of these words, not that I did anything much about them. I still kept putting things off that I wanted to do or had to do by saying that someday I’d do them. Not today, but some day. I’ve changed a bit as time has passed by, especially as I found a lack of God in middle age. Not that I knew the God character before, you understand, but as I sought answers, the main one was that this existence of mine, or everyone’s, was not infinite. I became convinced I would not survive my own death and end up in heaven. Because, in the immortal words of Belinda Carlisle, heaven is a place on earth.
We all put things off, don’t we? We say that we’ll do this, that and the other when we retire. We’ll have plenty of time before we grow too sick and infirm to do all those things when we didn’t have, didn’t make, enough time. We gamble that by the time we hit our late sixties, we’ll still be well and able to do then what we did 20 years before. Now, I am not so sure.
It is almost a year since I left the civil service, many years before I was due to go. I had long had enough and there was nothing left to give. There were many things I didn’t know and places I had not been. Work had taken the best years of my life and now I was approaching the less good years. I was still relatively fit and healthy, but not like I was in my 20s and 30s. Those days had long gone when I was doing something else. And although I still feel as young as I did, the things I used to do take longer, I do more slowly, they require more effort. They have done since I was 35 and it only gets worse.
In my office was a man who worked into his 70s. He died in service, never had the chance to retire. Throughout my life, I have known, been related to, people who have died far too young. Meanwhile, I was busy waiting for someday when everything would come right. I have friends who could retire now, on a relatively decent income, take nice holidays, have quality time with their spouses, but they prefer to carry on working for the Great British Pound, to retire on a juicy pension at the age of 65. But hang on: 65? Why stop then? You could carry on to 70, earn even more. All that lovely money.
Growing old brings few friends. Illness, dementia, infirmity – these will not be far away from the retiree who lives it until the end. Wouldn’t it be better to gamble on getting by by quitting when you are young rather than gambling on your health when you are in the early stages of being too old to do anything about it?
I’ve seen too much tragedy, too much sadness during my lifetime to believe that you should work for a living any longer than you have to. And the things you really want to do, well, you should do them. Someday really doesn’t come.
