Life After Retirement

Retirement can be one of life’s great rewards. After decades of working, meeting obligations, and living according to someone else’s schedule, we finally have more freedom to decide how our days will be spent. But there is an important distinction between retiring from a job and retiring from being useful…

Retirement is billed as the time when we finally get to do what we want. No alarm clock. No commute. No calendar filled with meetings we didn’t schedule. After decades of taking care of what needed to be taken care of, we’ve earned some freedom. But there’s an interesting question hiding inside that freedom: Do we know what we want?

I announced my decision to retire just before my 65th birthday. It wasn’t my first retirement. A divorce forced the sale of my business at the crack of Covid. My emergency back-up career in real estate served me well, but reaching Medicare age gave me a nudge…

When you tell someone you are leaving your career, the standard response is usually a variation of, “Congratulations! Enjoy the relaxation.” But when I told my sister I was retiring, she asked me a much sharper, better question: “What are your plans?” It was a beautiful question because it didn’t assume an ending. It demanded an “and.”

I used to think changing my mind meant I’d made the wrong decision. Now I think it often means I know something I didn’t know when I made the decision. There was a time when I was much more inclined to stick with things. Once I’d decided something, especially if I’d told others, changing it felt uncomfortable…

We spend decades preparing for retirement, and then somehow we’re expected to know exactly what we’re going to do with it before we’ve experienced a single ordinary day as a retired person. That’s an awfully high standard. Maybe we don’t need to have retirement all figured out. Maybe we just need to begin…

The independent living lifestyle can feel unsettling if one is new to it. On the other hand, it can be an exciting new life phase. Whether you are new or are already swimming the deep waters, you do have freedom that is not achievable if you have dependent children…

At the first stage of retirement, the transition stage, it is sometimes difficult to remember what day of the week it is when you wake up. For me, my pill box is my first reminder! A friend once told me that retirement meant that every day was Saturday…

There is a word I have been thinking about lately: margin. Years ago, when I was teaching first graders how to write, I remember pointing out the faint margin lines running down both sides of their copybooks. “See these lines?” I would say. “Your writing begins here on the left, and it stops here on the right. You don’t write all the way to the edge.”

In the two years before I retired, I put “write myself a job description for my retirement” on a list. Retirement, for those keeping score, is the part where you don’t have a job. The list lived on my phone, in a note called Elaine’s Retirement. It had 14 sections, because apparently my retirement required the same scope as my 1994 dissertation. Spiritual, Hobbies, Creativity…