Retirement is an Ongoing Process

Retirement is an ongoing process. It’s a new beginning for the rest of your life and the best part is that you have total control of where your journey will lead you.  After working for decades, the freedom to have every day to myself was something I could not even imagine.  Maybe you liked your job and maybe you liked school, but I didn’t.  I am thankful that I received a good education and that I had a good job but I didn’t really like school, and I don’t think I ever really liked any of the jobs that I had.  But I love retirement.  It’s like having every day being a snow day.  Do you remember that feeling?  Waking up and seeing the snow outside and finding out school was closed?  I lived for those days.  There was nothing better.  Now, I wake up with no alarm clock.  I have my coffee while I read the news.  I have no meetings or conference calls, no projects or presentations and there’s never any homework!

Now, sometimes people will ask me “what do you do all day?” and the truth is that it’s very different each day although it almost always involved my favorite activity which is reading.  I can read whatever I want and, believe me, the subjects are very different each day.  One thing leads to another and there is always something new to learn.  I love to read what happened on this day in history and that is usually enough to send me on my way.  I read a list of who was born on this day and who died and make sure I look at what happened on this day in sports.  I have used this as inspiration for reading, traveling and taking part in other activities because I view retirement as an ongoing process.

Retirement is an ongoing process and so is self-discovery.

I hope I’m not the same person I was a year or two years ago and I hope I’ll be different this time next year.  I hope I’m always growing and learning something new.  I can always get better with Spanish, my cooking techniques or some other hobby that I’ve been thinking about like model building or coin collecting.  Sometimes I read about something for weeks and then decide not to do it.  It’s never time that is wasted because I’m learning something all the time.  Everything about retirement is an ongoing process.  My wife has joined different activities like cards and Mah jong and has been a part of a garden club and all the related activities that go with it.  It’s amazing how different each person is and all the different interests we have.  Exploring these areas is a way we get to know ourselves better.  I may be in the minority, but I don’t think people know themselves as well as they think they do.  There are many philosophers and great thinkers who spent their lives writing about the need to know our inner selves.  It's a very unselfish thing to do, believe it or not, because the better we know how fragile we are, the better we treat other people.  We are all on the same journey.

I know many people who volunteer their time in retirement and find that to be the most fulfilling things in their life.  They also believe that retirement is an ongoing process and the more we can help our fellow travelers on this journey we call life, the better off we will all be.  I started this website with the hope of helping newly retired people, who might be feeling a bit lost, find their way in navigating this newfound freedom.  For some people, not having a job or someone telling them what to do is a bit uncomfortable and they struggle with ways to fill their time.  It is always my advice to have them look back on their life and find the things that interested them.  Make a list of all the things that you dreamed about doing, all the places you wanted to see or all the careers you considered at various times in your life.  That list is a starting point.  It’s the key to understanding the direction you want retirement to take you.  For me, it meant traveling the world and seeing all the places I had read about.  It’s about having the time to read about whatever interests me at the moment. 

.  I distinctly remember one day when I was about twelve, finding a four-leaf clover and trying to find out why these were so much rarer than the three-leaf clover.  Did I want to be a botanist?  No, but I really wanted to know why I was seeing what I was seeing.  I found out something about myself in the process – I like to know a little bit about a lot of things and not necessarily study anything in depth.  It’s actually how my career evolved.  I progressed through a variety of challenging positions.  I never wanted to stay in one job too long and, fortunately, I did well in my forty years with the company that I worked for.  It’s no wonder that I view retirement as an ongoing process and why I started this website.  There is much to learn in the world and many new places to see.  It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!

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