Contemplation

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got to this stage of my life, Early Retirement and still have no real answer.  It’s as though one day I just thought ‘carpe diem’ and went ahead and did it.

I’ve certainly been planning and preparing for this time of my life for a considerable length of time, a good 8 or 9 years I believe.  I am aghast when I hear of people who retire even later without any plan.  A friend of mine mentioned a chance encounter with a 71 year old gentleman who had recently retired, without a plan and persisted in asking her (a philosophy student) “what is the meaning of life”?  What an incredibly naive question to come from someone at that stage of their life!  Even if my friend had an answer, that answer would only be valid for herself, not for anyone else. 

After our conversation I thought about this gentleman and all the other people who go through life thinking retirement will give them all their dreams, almost as though it were a pill that constant dieters wish for, that “instant gratification”.  Well folks, I am here to tell you that there is no magic bullet that comes to you sudden like at age 65.  Recalling Barbara Walters’ summation on her special about Living to 100, she felt that what all her subjects had in common was a joy of living.  Perhaps for some that is “too cheerful” so I will modify my thought into saying that what makes life interesting is just that, finding that there is something interesting in the world every day.  That could be meeting someone new who has interesting conversation, it could be a terrific new book, it could be an experience you’ve been wanting to do all your life but either didn’t have the time, means or opportunity to test.  The worst thing a person can do for themselves is to sit in a rocking chair and let life pass them by, figuratively and literally.

Not everyone may have satisfaction in a structured day, week or year but one should have a purpose in getting up in the morning.  Last night I was thinking about my mother’s generation of housewives, women who married, raised children and kept house.  They didn’t have any sort of a retirement plan; they just continued doing what they had always done, well past the age of 65.  Then I got to thinking about my generation which is perhaps the first generation of women who almost universally left high school to either go to college or go directly to work, with the thought of working after marriage and after children.  We are the first complete generation of women who have worked for over 40 years and are now entering retirement age and there is not a lot of information about “how to do it”.

I am still studying and thinking about retirement for women and have not made any conclusions but I have a feeling that the format being used for men is not really the right format for women.  Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, remember?