Life After Retirement

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…

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…

There is a strange thing about retirement decisions: we often make some of the biggest ones when we have the least experience with the life we are choosing. You may have spent 30 or 40 years working, raising a family, paying a mortgage, building routines, and organizing your life around a calendar that was largely decided for you. Then retirement arrives and suddenly you have choices…

The money is handled. You met with the advisor, ran the numbers, and the date is coming into view. You did the responsible thing. The question that’s harder to answer, the one that comes up when someone asks what you’ll do with all that time in retirement, is who you’re going to be once the title is gone…

I have a question for the younger generations: When did leaving the house become impossible without a beverage companion? I’m not talking about a cup of coffee on the way to work. I understand that. I’m a coffee person myself. I’m talking about the phenomenon of the ever-present drink – the giant insulated tumbler, the designer water bottle…

A friend once told me she spent nearly six months deciding whether to move. She made lists. She talked with her children. She visited neighborhoods. She changed her mind more than once. Then one afternoon she laughed and said, “I finally realized I wasn’t trying to find the perfect decision. I was trying to become comfortable with whichever decision I made.”