The First Year of Your New Life

Chance favors the prepared mind.

— Louis Pasteur

* * *

The first year on the other side of the retirement threshold is easy for some, difficult for others, and different for everyone. It is a big transition, and as part of that transition you need to uncover your fears and emotions, and embrace the choices you have.

Therefore, the critical factor you must address is that change is indeed upon you. This is not a rehearsal of life; this is it. If you don't recognize that change is in your hands and that you simply must handle it and make decisions, then you will inevitably fall into a slow-paced, static, sedentary lifestyle. You will become used to boredom and restlessness, and — perhaps most importantly — it will slowly damage your body beyond repair. A few extra pounds here and there, a few extra glasses of wine, only a little bit of exercise, and a sleep-in day each week will all mount up.

Welcome to the Roller Coaster

When people first pass through the threshold from the work world to the rest of their lives, most have some sort of expectation of what things will look like on the other side; but few expect to find themselves sitting in a roller-coaster car. The ride begins with a slow uphill climb, as expected, and there is even a moment or two to pause and enjoy the sunny view from the top.

Suddenly, without warning, the car plunges down into a dark tunnel, where things prove to be more different than expected. Being seasoned travelers, most people don't panic, assuming that they will be back in the sunshine very soon.

But this metaphorical roller coaster has another destination, and before you know what has happened, you find yourself deep inside a carnival fun house, where the roof threatens to cave in on you, and unseen hands grab your sleeve from the left and right. What is most unnerving is that everyone seems to want something from you or to tell you what to do, and the whole experience makes you increasingly uneasy.

It does not seem to matter whether you were looking forward to being a glorified couch potato or whether you were dreading the endless hours around the house. Something that you can't quite put your finger on is making you very irritable, and there is just no pleasing you. When you are alone, you crave company, and when the relatives come over, you grimace and go hide in the den.

If you are like most of us, you get out of bed every day with the intention of keeping things on an even keel, but it doesn't always turn out that way. The purpose of this book is to offer some suggestions as to how to make your postwork journey look more like the following diagram:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Your Third Journey

Up until now, you have navigated through life using a set of lifestyle morals and principles that were either passed down to you by your parents or acquired independently through your own life experiences. If you are blissfully happy with your current situation, and your future is assured, close this book and walk away. We have no desire to wake you from the dream life that most Oldsters are still seeking.

However, if you are having a slightly uncomfortable thought that this might not be what you really want, then perhaps there are a few ideas in here that might prove useful.

We'll let you be the judge.

But before you do, consider the following: the way that human life is structured all over the planet. Every fiber of your being is conditioned to participate in an endless uphill climb throughout your first fifty years or so. There are goals to set, responsibilities to meet, children to raise, and promotions to acquire. Regardless of your culture, ethnicity, or religion, great pains are taken to equip you with the life skills that you need to make this initial journey.

But traditional retirement life presents itself as the antithesis of this; everything is geared toward winding down, managing some degree of failing physical functionality, and accepting diminished mental capacity.

Except for financial planning, there is no universal standard or source of collective wisdom for planning a successful second fifty years. The universal, generally accepted mantra seems to be, "Enjoy your time as you can, and accept your circumstance. You are old, and you are just going to get older."

It all seems so futile, and for a lot of people it is, because modern society has lulled us into a submissive state where we are conditioned to accept and expect that once we pass the age of sixty-five, we begin a long, slow slide into oblivion.

Considering Your Options

What can you do to prepare if you are not yet retired?

Should you consider embarking on a second career?

What can you do if you are already in the postwork phase of your life, and you are determined to reject the notion that everything is downhill from here on?

And so we say again: the only thing you really should be pondering with regard to the postwork phase of life is whether you are going to sink into the golden age of so-called decay or willfully choose the road not yet taken and embark on your Third Journey in defiance of yourself, your circumstances, and advice from well-intentioned family members.

"So why bother?" you might ask.

"Well, what if you are a scientist, sitting on the cure for cancer, but you don't know that yet, and you never find out because you stopped going to the lab because your knees ached a bit, and you didn't like riding the bus?"

"That's ridiculous."

"No, it isn't. Just because a company or a government retired you does not mean that you have fulfilled your purpose as a person or that you have accomplished your mission."

"But I am sixty-five years old!"

"Well, then, you'd better get moving in a hurry if you want to get everything done in time!"

* * *

Okay, so we exaggerate a little to make a point, but the following list definitely proves that you are never too old to accomplish something amazing. As you read, consider what the world might be like if these people had given up, just because they were older:

• Benjamin Franklin signed the American Declaration of Independence at the age of seventy.

• Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa at the age of seventy-six.

• Mother Teresa was sixty-nine when she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Grandma Moses did not start painting until she was seventy-six and kept right on going until she died at the age of 101.

• At the age of one hundred, Ralph Waldo McBurney published his first novel, titled My First 100 Years. He lived to the age of 106 and was considered to be the oldest worker in America at that time.

• At fifty-five, Pablo Picasso completed his masterpiece Guernica.

• At fifty-six, Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China.

• At fifty-eight, Sony chairman Akio Morita introduced the Sony Walkman and changed the music industry forever.

• At fifty-nine, "Satchel" Paige became the oldest Major League baseball player.

• At sixty-two, J. R. R. Tolkien published the ?rst volume of his fantasy series, The Lord of the Rings.

• At sixty-five, jazz musician Miles Davis performed his final live album, just weeks before he died.

• At sixty-eight, the English experimentalist Sir William Crookes began investigating radioactivity and invented a device for detecting alpha particles.

• At seventy, Cornelius Vanderbilt began buying railroads.

• At seventy-one, Katsusuke Yanagisawa, a retired Japanese schoolteacher, became the oldest person to climb Mount Everest.

• At seventy-seven, John Glenn became the oldest person to go into space.

• At seventy-eight, Chevalier de Lamarck proposed a new theory of the evolutionary process, claiming that acquired characteristics can be transmitted to offspring.

• At seventy-nine, Asa Long became the oldest US checkers champion.

• At eighty-two, William Ivy Baldwin became the oldest tightrope walker, crossing the South Boulder Canyon in Colorado on a 320-foot wire.

• At eighty-eight, Michelangelo created the architectural plans for the Church of Santa Maria.

• At ninety, Marc Chagall became the ?rst living artist to be exhibited at the Louvre museum.

• At ninety-three, P. G. Wodehouse worked on his ninety-seventh novel and was knighted.

• At ninety-four, comedian George Burns performed in Schenectady, New York, sixty-three years after his ?rst performance there.

• At ninety-five, Nola Ochs became the oldest person to receive a college diploma.

Case Study: Is Early Retirement Everything They Tell You?

Barry had been an executive manager for most of his business life. He worked for a multinational company and was based in one location but traveled to subsidiary companies and clients around the world. He was certainly well compensated, and when he was at home, mainly on weekends, he loved to play golf. As he was crossing over the sixty-year mark, he really began to feel that the pressure of work, travel, and client dinners was taking its toll on him. He was tired and drained and decided to accept a lucrative early retirement package.

At his leaving party, he excitedly announced, "I am really looking forward to playing more golf, especially during the week when the course is quieter. I reckon two days during the week, plus I'll keep my Saturday date with our usual foursome. So far so good."

The first three months were wonderful. He was free at last and was thoroughly enjoying his own space. Yet by month four he was already craving something more to do. He still loved being on the fairways, to be sure, but the "afterlife," as he called it, was not working out as he had envisaged it.

"Financially, I'm secure for life, and I will easily leave a good level of money to the kids, but I don't feel fulfilled. Maybe I do miss the razzmatazz of the office life after all. I don't honestly think so, to be honest, but I'm not as occupied mentally as I expected to be. Although, in fairness to myself, I don't think I gave much thought to the intellectual side of life. I was probably almost entirely consumed with fresh air and golf balls."

So what's his advice?

"If you can, stay working for as long as you can. Retirement is a great idea, but in this day and age where we are healthier and, in theory, at least younger, then age sixty, as I was, is just too early in one's personal evolution to retreat from the world. Maybe I should have stuck it out a few years longer or at least thought over the decision to leave work for longer than I did."

Barry is now in his fifth year of retirement. He still plays golf but only twice a week, once at the weekend. He managed to get some part-time consulting work that keeps him busy for a good part of the week and encourages him to keep up-to-date with what is going on in his industry, which satisfies his need for mental stimulation.

Unraveling the Mess

The hardest thing to do when you first leave the work world is to realize that all of your old dog-eat-dog work habits have followed you home, and they are in the process of messing up your shiny new life.

As you pass through the retirement threshold into the postwork world, there are certain things you expect to collect: your retirement gift, your pension plan information, your bus pass, and your freedom. But there is something else that clings to your shoe as you pass through the retirement threshold that very few people expect — your personal stuff.

Think of this as your own invisible, knotted-up ball of negativity, composed of all the accumulated fears, weaknesses, vices, and regrets that have built up inside you during the first half of your life. If you are some sort of a Zen master, your ball of stuff might be as small as a marble, but if you have been careless with yourself, it might be as large as a bale of hay. Either way, you have no choice but to carry it with you on your Third Journey, like an invisible ball and chain, unless you decide to do something about it.

As should be clearly understood, we are not medical professionals, and there are some problems that definitely require professional assistance to resolve. Having said that, if you view your lifetime of accumulated blockages as a knotted ball of twine, then you will realize that regardless of how large or how tangled it is, you can begin to gently unravel it with outside help, if needed, but you can at least make some progress on your own.

In time, if you stick at it, you will be surprised just how much progress you can make, both in unraveling the deeply buried fears and prejudices that you know have always held you back and, more important, in beginning to understand some of your deeper weaknesses that you never realized were driving your decision-making processes.

As you read the later chapters of this book, you will see that we have tackled all the subjects and situations that you are likely to confront, and we offer some insights regarding how to break them down into bite-size pieces.

Everyone tells you it is time to downsize, organize, and clean out the closets when you retire — the physical collections. But why is it that no one stresses the importance of clearing out all the mental baggage that you have been dragging around in your psyche?

You may need to think about this issue for a little while and self-analyze many areas unique to you. So in the meantime, let's figure out how well you know yourself. Get a pencil and complete the following sentences, using your personal circumstances as a reference. Go ahead, and write the very first thing the pops into your head as you do this (we promise not to peek!).

Okay, ready?

• When I was ten, I was the best one in my class at ____________

• When I was in high school, everyone knew me as a _____________

• When I worked, my job was to _________________________________

• Now that I am free to do anything, my job is to _____________

• My project for the rest of my life is to ____________________

"Whoa, there ... what's this stuff about a job? I just retired five minutes ago. I have earned the right to take it easy!"

"Easy? Did you ever stop to ask yourself if you actually want to be idle?"

"What?"

"Are you sure that you are ever going to be happy watching the world rush by when you could be doing something useful with your time?"

Developing a New Purpose

Think about it this way: up until the moment you stopped working, you were fully employed doing a job, running a household, raising a family, or meeting deadlines. Unless you are already a master planner with a detailed road map for the rest of your life, the moment you passed through the retirement threshold, you ceased to have a clear purpose, and the world around you began treating you as if you were no longer useful.

You might still be interested in making a traditional work contribution, but more than likely the workforce is no longer interested in you; they have traded you in for a shiny new genius with a computer strapped to his wrist, and there is not a moment to lose if you want to avoid that downhill plunge into the darkness.

The feeling that you are creeping toward the end of life may seem overwhelming, or you may choose simply to ignore this fear and get on with living your life. The best practice is to recognize aches and pains as they arise, and while they must be considered for health reasons, don't classify them as signals that it is time to give up. Clearly, if there are medical issues, then take all necessary advice and precautions, but leaving that aside, life after retirement is not in a holding pattern. It is the time to refresh your thinking, your ideas, your plans, and your lifestyle.

Face this reality and decide on a purpose for your new life as soon as you are able to do so. It is okay if you change your purpose as you progress, but the moment you cease to have one, it is the same as being out of work. The longer you let things slide, the harder it will be to get back to work. This is a situation you need to avoid at all costs, because the more you fall into despair the more likely you are to develop a chronic health condition brought on by stress.

Once the idea of rethinking and restructuring takes hold, the retirement lifestyle will evolve into a very exciting time of your life. Yes, you can travel and see places you always wanted to visit, and yes, you can do more gardening, but the fundamental change you will experience is that all decisions about lifestyle are now made by you, not by a boss (spouse aside!) and not determined by some company policies and procedures. If you want to eat dinner at 4:00 p.m. or Skype with the Philippines at 3:00 a.m., so be it.

The freedom-of-choice issue is like a light going on in your mind.

You can — and inevitably will — be influenced by other people, friends, family, peers, and so forth. You will be influenced by money, weather, politics, and social factors, but everyday decisions are all yours to make. This can be a double-edged sword in that the more freedom you actually have, the more daunting the task of making choices can be, and not everyone handles this well.