PELLER'S BLOG
Retiring Well: Crafting a Nourishing Retirement
My dad took out his violin on the weekends, tuned the strings, and practiced for several hours. He played like the songs of the big bands: Glen Miller and Guy Lombardo. We’d all heard the stories about how he had an orchestra that performed on the radio in the early thirties. That’s how he made his living before he met my mother one summer evening playing in the Catskills. After he married and had us kids, he went to work for the post office. It all felt very romantic and sad to me. Once he said,” it’s rare for a person to combine their vocation and avocation.” He died at the work with his music still left inside him.
Some people spend all their lives employed, so when they retire, it’s like being let out of prison. I have a friend like that, who after five years into retirement, is still a force of nature, unstoppable doing all the things she put on hold over thirty years of teaching.
There are others who retire, and find their days stretch like vast wastelands. They’ve had so much structure and busyness in their life that when set free, their identity is lost. They’re adrift.
I’ve seen some who work longer into their sixties and seventies, eager to continue to experience the fulfillment that work brings them, but they work less and slowly phase in things they want to learn.
I hate the word retirement. It’s so diminishing, since our culture is infatuated with youth and energy. Retirement is the next to the last chapter. At parties, when people ask me what I do, and I say, “I’m retired,” they avert their eyes and scan the room to find someone else to talk to. Instead, I like to say, I’ve cut back, to find my voice, or I’m discovering my creative abilities, or I’m going on some adventurous inner and outer journeys.”
The first half of our lives are about acquisition: finding the right work, the right partner, and raising a family, the second half of our lives are about divestiture: simplifying, focusing, pacing, and redefining what success means at this new life stage.
Just the way structure defined me in my career life, non-structure is healing in itself. I look at my appointment book and I’m delighted to see that I have the whole day free to do as I please. I can live on my own terms now.
Each day I ask myself what do I want to learn about today? Where would I like to go? Who would I like to spend the day with? Sometimes our years of hiding from others just to fit in and exceed in a career has been so successful, that we no longer have access to our own voice. This is a time to unapologetically give ourselves permission to do those things we’ve put away and hidden from ourselves,so unlike my father, we don’t die with the music still left inside us.