Getting Involved

There are few things I love more about my retirement than setting my own schedule.  I get up just after sunrise and roam.  I accomplish all kinds of things during the day, most of the time more than I planned to.  But each and all are from an agenda defined by my own choice, at my own pace.  This is new. 
But now, I realize there are some things I want to do that do not operate in this manner.  Choir, social gatherings, working for a political candidate.  All of them are important, each in its own way.  All of them have to do with getting involved with people outside the borders of my property.  All of them demand that I take others into account, limiting and expanding my categories of acceptance and tolerance.  And all of them point beyond myself, my own agenda.
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."  Not.
Most of what I have been, most of what I have done, most of the places I've gone, and the things I've accomplished have been about other people, organizations, and agendas set to a large degree by others.  I realize that it is not wrong to spend time changing that kind of life style.  I need to be my own person.  I need to claim my own agenda.  I need to claim time and use it to be creative in ways I've never had the opportunity or energy. 
But my need is not the only priority for me or certainly for the world in which I live.  Our planet, our nation, and the state of our habitation cannot be guided or lifted by one person.  Even the Lord recruited a bunch of people to move in new directions.
This nation is having a season of self involvement, claiming me, myself, and I and the comfort thereof as the only priorities that matter.  That is small minded and tragically destructive.  I cannot hide from the political ugliness that runs like a sewer through our present tense.  I cannot pretend that my bonsai, my carpentry, my home development, my reading, my writing, my learning, or even working on a loving home is all I can do to help. 
I am in a different era of my life.  So what?  I have been given gifts that can help, and I need to utilize them.  I don't know how.  I don't know where.  But that can be addressed.  I need to be careful not to slug others with my new found freedom.  Social skills need to be belted on just like pants that don't have paint on them. 
I won't give up my fun and games.  This place is my palace.  It won't stay that way if I go traipsing around being important.  I need to be a good steward.  And I need to help bring us back out of the middle ages.  I don't think they're mutually exclusive. 
Besides, who says I can't have fun being a pain in the ass out there?