I’m finding it hard to settle down to anything tonight. Tomorrow is an important day and I’m restless. I pick up a magazine. I don’t want to go to bed too early because I don’t think I’ll sleep very well.
An article catches my attention. It’s about something called ikigai. Apparently, it’s Japanese for a sense of purpose. It says you can lose it for various reasons, and one of them may be when your kids leave home, the so-called empty-nest syndrome.
I wonder if that’s what’s happened to me now that my two are at university. There’s only a year between them, so they both left within a short space of time. Soon afterwards, I took voluntary early retirement. I had all sorts of plans for what I was going to do with my new-found freedom but other things got in the way. I haven’t really got around to planning anything yet.
I’m fine, really, except for this lost feeling I get sometimes. I’m not lonely. I’ve got lots of friends. I think it’s because
