Retirement Gives You Wisdom

I have no doubt that retirement gives you wisdom.  I fully admit that I was not the calmest person when things went wrong.  I didn’t lose my temper; I just silently stressed myself into a state of despair that would sometimes get in the way of a normal existence.  To this day, when I get upset, I find it hard to eat and stay calm.  But I am much better than when I was younger.  Everything was a crisis.  It stayed that way until my early thirties when I actually seeing the fruits of my labor at work.  I was gaining respect for my contribution and, when layoffs were threatened, I felt confident that I would be retained.  I always had the best family life so that was never a source of anxiety.  We were blessed with two healthy children who grew up to be wonderfully mature adults.  I give my wife all the credit for that and it allowed me to focus on providing as much as I could for our family.

I got even better as things went along and my days of distress were fewer and milder.  Although I could never say that I liked my job, I realized that if I just kept going along everything would work out.  My savings for retirement were in good shape and although the stock market downturns of 1987, 2001 and 2008 were severe, I knew I had the time to make it up.  I had read a lot about investing and knew that no matter how much the market went down, taking out your money was the one way to guarantee a loss.  When the pandemic hit in 2020, I was already retired and took the whole thing in stride.  I realized that retirement gives you wisdom or, more precisely, experience is a great teacher if you open your mind to ways to learn from an experience.  There were many of my friends who reached retirement age with very little money saved.  Whatever money they put away went into low interest saving accounts because they knew they could never lose money.  They acted out of fear and paid a price.

Retirement gives you wisdom if you make the effort to lean from every experience.

We look at our retirement years with nothing but gratitude and realize that our health plays a major role in what we can and can’t do.  Retirement gives you wisdom and the one thing we knew was to “do it while you can” when it comes to travel, hobbies, new interests or almost any kind of activity.  We did our “big move” to a new house in a new area when we were in our early sixties and had the energy to follow up on all the details that new construction involves.  Although there were some stressful days, we had a blast doing everything from the design of the house to finding a builder.  Building on a piece of property that was part of a beautiful lake community in upstate New York, we had the property landscaped with a dock so that we could enjoy a new way of life.  Going from the hustle and bustle of Long Island to the rural surroundings of Greene County never failed to yield surprises and most of them were on the pleasant side.  People say hello to you in a store and wave to you as you take an afternoon stroll to get your mail.  Yes, we do have to walk (or ride) about a mile to the community mailroom, and the nearest grocery store is about twenty miles away but those are small prices to pay for living in one of the most beautiful areas in the country.  The Hudson River is about a mile away and there are mountains in view to our east and west.  When we retired, we really got away from it all.

This was the life we had planned for about ten years before we were ready to stop working.  There is nothing that I would change.  Fortunately, we stayed healthy during Covid although we know many people who lost loved ones.  Even at the height of the pandemic, we knew everything would be okay.  I truly believe that retirement gives you wisdom because, at that age, you have enough experience to know that almost nothing is as bad as it first seems and there are ways to get through almost anything.  I don’t mention it very often on these pages, but faith plays a big part in our life and part of the wisdom you gain in retirement may very well come from exploring that aspect that too many people try their best to ignore.

So, if retirement gives you wisdom, what will your next learning experience be?  Travel the world or start a new hobby.  Write a book or learn to play an instrument.  Create your own business or build your dream house.  The possibilities are endless and the choice is yours.  The one thing I’m sure of is that it’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!

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