Our Battle Against Time

The reality is that we are all going to lose our battle against time.  How’s that for a cheerful thought?  But the reality is that if we take that reality into consideration, we can turn our life into a purposeful pursuit of happy moments and wonderful relationships.  When you approach each day with purpose amazing things begin to happen.  When I was imprisoned in Corporate America and desperately trying to change my attitude in life from resigned despair to making the right choices toward happiness, I read an incredible number of self-improvement books and adopted many of the techniques described by those authors.  One piece of advice was to work like you’re going on vacation.

If you think back to those days when you were only given one or two weeks of vacation, you wanted to make every second of that precious time count.  The last thing you wanted was a call from work about some problem that you had forgotten about.  The author said to take notice of how productive you become on the last couple of days before a vacation.  You become a whirlwind of activity to take care of everything on your list.  On those occasions you became a winner in our battle against time.  You were invigorated and determined to do everything you needed to do.

We all should take that attitude into retirement and make it as enjoyable as we can.  We should have a list that’s similar to our “task lists” from our working days.  The difference is that you are the keeper of that list, and it can be as challenging and adventurous as you can make it.  If you look through this website, you’ll notice that I take nothing off the table as a possibility.  You may have to make a few adjustments to your retirement dreams here and there but if it’s somewhere in your mind as something you wanted to do in your life, it should be on that list.  As I’ve said before, your dream of winning the Masters may have to be downsized to a trophy at your local country club, but that thrill of winning will still be there and the sense of accomplishment you get by mastering something is what makes you happy at the end of the day.  You’ll feel like a winner in our battle against time.  We all know that we’re aging, and our athletic days are fading, but if you can recapture a few moments here and there, you’ll be a role model for everyone around you.

We will all end up losing our battle against time.

It doesn’t have to be sports related either.  I know someone who is taking up writing again and is loving every minute of it.  It may seem strange for those who don’t like to write, but there is a wonderful feeling when you capture your thoughts on a page and know that you’ve communicated your thoughts in the best way you know how.  You also know you can always do better, and you work to sharpen your skills.  Perhaps you take a writing course or join a club where everyone shares their latest work.  You develop a mindset that makes you want to improve, and you discover a new purpose in life.  It’s your own little world and you can create whatever you want.  Whether it’s a novel, a well-researched biography, your own life story or just a website about your favorite topics in life, you become energized and forget about getting older.  In fact, in some ways you’re getting wiser as you learn to use your experience in life to communicate with others.  In the end we may all lose our battle against time but there’s no reason we can’t go down fighting.

That’s exactly how my wife and I feel about traveling.  We look around our fellow passengers on this journey we call life, and we realize we’ve got to do it while we can because we all reach the day when the fruits of travel might not be worth the effort.  Until that happens, you’ll see us squeezing as many trips into a year as we can afford.  Twenty years ago, we took a river cruise in Europe and thought it was a once in a lifetime experience.  The problem was that we fell in love with Europe and that style of travel.  We spent the first two years of our retirement exploring the warmer climates of the United States and expanded our cruise experience to include some ocean voyages.  We realized that we had come face to face with our battle against time and started to compile our list of top places to see.  We have enjoyed every minute of the past seven years and there is never anything morbid about thinking that any day you wake up could be our last.  That’s not morbidity, that’s reality.  The more we see of this wonderful world, the more we realize how much more we want to see.  We will all lose our battle against time, but we can go out with both guns blazing!  Get out and see the world.  It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!

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