Retirement’s Nemesis
When you’re in your fifties,
retirement may be a pleasant day
dream, like playing golf, skiing,
or just relaxing forever…no more
stress. By our early sixties, however,
that longing for retirement may have
shifted to a tinge of skepticism.
Playing golf forever may mean
Larry Wonderling
playing golf alone, since your older
friends seem to become invalids or dying.
Suddenly, it hits you right between your bifocals. You’re
really not too old, too ugly, or too sick, you’re just too
retired, which seems to also mean you’re too unqualified,
unfit, un-everything. When you’re pronounced retired, the
door seems to shut behind you and you’re left with the
muffled sounds of life’s once exciting challenges. You’re
not much more than a spectator, watching the action while
never expecting a request to participate.
While still healthy, alert, and knowledgeable, you’ve
been buried alive, because sadly, retirement too often
means good-bye, good luck, and try to die with dignity. This
suggests that, in self-defense, killing the word retirement
may be the only rational recourse before it prematurely
kills us.
My observation of old retired buddies constantly
suggests that the psychological expectations following
retirement are vital to both quality and length of life.
As I must have said in other articles, continuing to live
young by disregarding your chronological age will inspire
an infinitely longer life than believing you’re too old and
retired to do much more. It’s your time to reexamine that
list of intriguing activities you never got around to because
you were too busy working. So this may be the time to
recheck that list and try doing many of the things you’ve
delayed doing.
At least to me, the axiom “you are what you do” remains
a rather clear working paradigm of your future. If you
simply hang around trying to preserve your remaining
health, what you’re doing will probably reduce both your
quality and length of life. If, on the other hand, you focus
on each tomorrow as a new, exciting challenge, those
stifling preoccupations with dying will no longer matter.
Transition, restoration, even rejuvenation are words far
more worthy of the twilight years of our life than the term
“retirement.”
These should be the years when our errors, through
endless trials, have finally paid off. A time when we can
return what we’ve learned to others, and most definitely,
a time when this final phase may yield respect from those
still struggling up the mountain. The Spanish have a word
“jubilarme” in referring to retirement. It means jubilation,
a term that instantly creates positive expectations, not the
negative set of “retirement.” The struggle to that final
plateau in life is tough enough without being smilingly
ushered out sundown’s back door.
– Larry Wonderling, Ph.D.
Email: [email protected]
Happy New Year!
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