Getting Close

Getting Close

So if you're getting a bit weary of hearing me blather on and on about my impending retirement, perhaps now might be the time to set this blog down and go do something important – chopping wood for the upcoming winter or putting up your storm windows perhaps. Those tasks are important and will pay off very soon. I extremely doubt that reading this will benefit you as much as those projects will, but if you're even a tiny bit curious about the jumbled thoughts whirring around in my gourd at the present time, pray read on.

You may recall I penned a previous blog when the countdown to my retirement reached 99 days. I called it my double-digit dance and went on a bit about the scarcity of days from that point until my retirement. Writing that seems like only a few weeks ago, but it actually is quite a bit longer than that. I'm now under a month, calendar time, and tomorrow marks 20 work days until the magic number of one.

It's coming right up, my friends. Right around the corner to borrow a cliché that's been too often used. But cliché or not, it's quite true.

This time next month I will have been retired for a few days.

I've spent part of the past year questioning most of my retired friends about their ongoing feelings about retirement and am at about a 96% response that “they love it” or “they're busier now than when they worked” or “they don't know HOW they ever made time for work in the old days.” I've had one or two exceptions which sort of mumbled and let me know that they had to do something and had gone back to some sort of paying job, but the vast majority were satisfied and more than satisfied.

So I try to integrate all those responses to my questions and try to imagine the world wherein I will not be an employed member thereof. Where I don't have to “punch a time clock” either actually or metaphorically. Where the 24 hours of the day will belong to me and me alone. Of course excepting the things I have to do to maintain my home, my health and my marriage. Those will obviously still be ongoing tasks. But I still scratch my head and wonder how I'll cope in that new world. I suppose a lot of this mental fidgeting is due to my unfortunate habit of over-analyzing events and situations, to conjure up horrible futures and worry overmuch about “the downside” of what's upcoming. Worrying about things that probably should not be worried about. Coming up with strange future scenarios where I... Where I... Hmmm... To tell the truth, they generally come to me in dreams – nightmares, actually – and cause my first hour or so after arising to be vaguely uncomfortable, as if I'm waiting for the proverbial “other shoe” to drop. Soon I'm back to my normal irascibility, but the vaguely-remembered sense of doom will sometimes return at odd moments and color the rest of the day.

Perhaps that melancholy flavor to an approaching “good” time might be due to the remembered retirements of family members and other friends from an older generation. What did retirement mean to them? The couch, the easy chair, endless games of cribbage or euchre and, not too far down that road, the sad faces of mourners at a funeral.

Yes, I realize that is not particularly how retirement is viewed now days. Since we're all (knock on wood) living much longer, retirement seems to be regarded now as a sort of new adult-flavored childhood with less stress, more time to do hobbies, sports and to interact much more with other folks. A time to write that short story, to learn that new language, to knit or sew, to golf, to learn that Asian cooking technique that seemed so baffling last year, to travel more and to learn more about what and who we are in relation to our wants and needs rather than how to achieve whatever it was we were striving for in our working lives.

I'm anticipating that all these pre-retirement anxieties will blow over fairly quickly once the actuality of not working happens. I'll find new trade winds to fill my sails with and new horizons to steer toward.

At least I hope that's what's going to occur.

I suppose my work life is similar to others of my age. I started working for a wage around age 16 and pretty much wrapped my life around one job or the other over the following 50 years, give or take. I've defined who I am by what I do. I'd venture to say most of us do that. I'm a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer. I'm a boilermaker. I'm a carpenter. I'm a stevedore. Or in my case, I'm a computer guy in one flavor or another over the years – student, operator, supervisor, testing analyst and so forth. Dropping that description of myself will be difficult although how difficult I'm not sure. I guess the new appellation I could put on my name-tag could be “former” computer guy.

I guess that sounds workable and I could live with it.

One thing I know for sure though. I know I'll miss my friends here at work. I've been around a lot of these folks for a decade or more and cutting myself off from them will be difficult. They were and are touchstones in my life. Sure we'll probably talk on the phone or text, have lunch once in a while, maybe there will be some communication on one of the social medias. But the human contact... that's going to to be tough to walk away from. So, so tough...

Humans, especially us older ones, hate change. We hate having our established routines dislodged and our comfortable day-to-day activities altered. It's hard for us to, in essence, start over – to forge new paths and to make new relationships. To walk down roads in lands we're aliens in.

But that's the reality of retirement, in my mind at least. It's change with a capital “C”.

So how am I going to handle retirement? Will I slip gracefully into it like an Olympic diver slides into the pool without a splash? Or will I enter my new position kicking and screaming for a go-around, a redo, another quick ride on the merry-go-round?

I suppose my present state of mind might be called apprehensive with a lot of hope. Or forward-looking with some scattered trepidation. A mix of ups and downs, pluses and minuses.

Obviously time will tell how retirement and I end up coexisting.

So, for the time being, let's just say I'm considering retirement as a sort of graduation, like finishing high school or college, and gazing steadily into a rose-tinted future that stretches far, far ahead of me, full of opportunity and fulfillment.

I surely hope so.

In any event, I'll try to get back to you, dear reader, when I reach the single-digit-dance phase. That ought to be interesting.