Finding Your Purpose in Retirement
This website is designed to make your retirement years as enjoyable as possible, and we offer suggestions on activities, hobbies, travel ideas and ways to challenge yourself to make the most of your golden years. Once in a while I get a comment from a reader who says that this all sounds very nice but isn’t it a little self-centered? Isn’t there more to life than pleasure and enjoyment? I absolutely believe that there is much more to life than the activities described above but the focus of these activities is always to learn as much as possible about yourself and the world we live in. Finding your purpose in retirement can only be done by exploring ourselves and the world around us. When we find what gives us true enjoyment, it’s usually connected to something much larger than ourselves. You have to first find out what you enjoy doing and then understand why you like doing that activity. You begin to see that you’re part of a larger picture. This is an incredibly wonderful world that we have all been blessed to be a part of and when we find beauty in one area, it helps us to find the beauty in all areas. We fear what we don’t know. Different cultures, customs and languages can put a distance between people. The more we can expose ourselves to different perspectives, the more we can understand that people everywhere want the same thing. We find a purpose to our existence. We are meant to help those around us on our common journey.
Finding your purpose in retirement, can help unlock many secrets that Life holds.
For some people that may be a bit of a stretch. But, after over seventy years of living what I hope has been an informed life, I have found that the more I learn the more I want to know. When I follow that path, it becomes my personal journey in this thing called life. I know it’s a poor excuse, but I didn’t have the time to do this while I was working. I was too busy worrying about making money to support a family. I should have made the time to look beyond my job, but I didn’t. I knew that when I could escape Corporate America, the dreams and ambitions that had been pent up in my being could be fully explored. I knew I had a desire to do certain things, and I was hoping those desires were there for a reason. Finding your purpose in retirement involves the “why” for all of those things you had developed a desire to do. There’s a reason a certain hobby appeals to you, and I think there’s something common in almost all hobbies or other activities that point us to a purpose in life.
In The Self Discovery Challenge for Retirement, I have tried to guide people through a process that will force them to look through their memory archives for those hidden gems that will reveal aspects of their inner self that they may have forgotten about. Whatever those moments of recall reveal need to be explored. They are there for a reason. I spent hours with a Christmas present I had received when I was about twelve. It was called Foto Fun, and it involved taking a negative (if you recall, pictures used to be made from negatives) and putting it on top of photographic paper and then placing it under a light for about two minutes. What came out of that process was a “picture” that I had made myself. They gave you a bunch of negatives to start with, and they depicted the Sphinx, the Pyramids, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Parthenon. I was entranced by these portrayals of foreign lands and wondered if I could ever see them in person. It was a dream that eventually got transformed into travel which we have been able to do in retirement in a way that has been truly enriching to my wife and me. I am convinced that, in some way, that experience I had at the age of twelve is related to what I was able to do in retirement. Finding your purpose in retirement can reveal so much about and life itself that it one of the reasons I believe so strongly in the self-discovery process.
Do hobbies teach you about life? They absolutely can. As I’ve spoken about repeatedly throughout these pages, hobbies should be challenging and give you the opportunity to grow within whatever activity you have chosen. If you don’t have any learning taking place, you don’t have progress and you don’t have fulfillment. You just have an activity that passes the time. A true hobby is an enjoyable way to bring discipline and structure into an activity that you look forward to and miss when you don’t have the time to do it. When you can bring discipline and structure into even one area of your life, you can see it spread to other areas. When you know that there is an organized approach to mastering something, you appreciate other masters as well. A fine woodworker can easily transfer the knowledge of what it took to get to their level of skill into an appreciation for another craft like restoring an antique car, painting a landscape, cooking a twelve-course dinner or even writing a poem that will bring a tear to your eye. We’re all called to find our purpose in life and, if you’re like me, you may have gone through more time than you care to admit without success. Finding your purpose in retirement can make up for all the years of searching and, in some ways, it may remind you of that great story and movie “The Wizard of Oz”.
We all remember Dorothy’s amazing trip to Emerald City which turned out to actually be a dream caused by a window slamming into her head and knocking her unconscious during a cyclone. She encounters a rather diverse group of friends who join her on a quest to find the qualities they think they lack and to ask the great Wizard of Oz to give them what they need. We all know that the Scarecrow had more knowledge than he gave himself credit for, the Tin Man cried repeatedly from an aching heart already in his possession (even though it caused him to rust) and the Cowardly Lion has all the courage he needs when he’s pressed into action. Dorothy, who started the journey looking for her way back home, wakes up in her own bed at the end of the movie. When she recounts her story, her aunt asks Dorothy if she learned anything and she wisely said that she now knows that anything she needs she already has in her own backyard. So do we. All the clues have been laid down in our own journey through life, and the Self Discovery Challenge for Retirement can be used to help you find them. I strongly believe that finding your purpose in retirement will help you discover your purpose in life if you haven’t been fortunate enough to find it already. We live in a magnificent world that is meant to be experienced as fully as we possibly can. Don’t wait for a cyclone. Start a new experience right now. It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!
Thanks for visiting. If you like what you see here, please tell your friends. If you haven’t done so already, be sure you take The Self Discovery Challenge for Retirement! It’s designed to help you make the most of this wonderful time of your life. You’re never too old to discover something new about yourself!
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