TriumphAnt

Retirement Report – First of a series

You know that hackneyed phrase (I’ve even used it myself recently), “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”? Well... Day 1 of retirement really walks that talk.

Thing is, I’m still not at all sure if my first response should be “YESSS!!” or “Oh my GOD!”

Before I actually reached the date, my intellectual mind was feeding me all sorts of great advice that it now turns out my emotional mind was sitting in a corner blowing off with little snickers and quiet repetitions of the Eliza Doolittle song from “My Fair Lady”, “Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait!”

Qualifier: As this is being written, the official start to my status as “retired” is barely a couple days behind me. However, I also used up three weeks of my earned holidays before reaching that date so the preliminary feelings of being in a retired state are probably about a month old.

Now I realize that by either measure, that’s ridiculously early to start pontificating about retirement but if I mean to track the process, this is as good a time as any to start, or as Glinda (photo) put it so succinctly all the way back in 1939, “It’s always best to start at the beginning.”

Several years ago, I took a three-day retirement planning seminar. Among its many worthwhile topics were three things that the RPI (Retirement Planning Institute, believe it or not) stressed were the “most important”: your financial preparation; your physical preparation; your emotional preparation.

Financial has been easy, but only because I haven’t had to work too hard at it myself. Leslie has always been the family money manager and luckily for me, not only is she incredibly good at it, she enjoys it. For the past... forever, I’ve just been signing over significant portions of my monthly paycheque to her, and she’s been building the means by which we will be able to enjoy a reasonably comfortable retirement, so long as the price of Miss Vicky’s potato chips doesn’t skyrocket. So, financial planning: check.

Physical preparation. For the past two years, I’ve been gradually clearing off all the things that might be cause for concern as a newly-minted 60-year old. Most importantly (LOUD knock on wood), despite Mom and Dad’s both having died of one or more of the “big scary things”, so far they are not in my body (or at least have not made themselves sufficiently visible to be detected). Along the way, I discovered – or re-discovered – the joys of a colonoscopy and multiple DREs (a digital rectal exam – and yes it is as revolting as its name implies) and blood pressure cuffs and needle jabs to draw off blood samples, and eye exams and new twinges that weren’t present a week ago. And so on and on.

The only doctor-ordained prescription in my life is a light blood pressure medication because my most helpful family physician decided I’ve been running at “the high side of normal” for long enough that he wanted to see it brought back to simply “normal”. So I launch every day now with a potent Americano and my new friend, Apo-Triazide.

I’ve also joined – with Leslie – a nearby very well-equipped Fitness Club and for the past five months we have been there almost without fail every other day. So... physical preparation: check.

And I won’t lie. What really helped spur my “Because I can...” thinking when it came to taking early retirement were the deaths of both Mom and Dad last year, just months apart. Both struggled in their last couple years, and seemed to spend more time in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals than at home. Their unspoken legacy was the importance of making what you want out of life while your body is still able to carry you along that path, because if you live long enough, the day eventually will come when it can’t.

Which brings me to emotional preparation and the “YESSS!!” vs “Oh my GOD!” internal debate. One of the first numbers that has come to mind is this: for the first time in 36 years, I am not working fulltime for someone.

One of the second numbers that has come to mind is assuming I take reasonable care of myself and my biology isn’t attacked by something incurable, longevity these days being what it is, it is just possible that I could still be hanging around for at least that same amount of time.

So taking those two numbers in turn, you can probably see where I come to both “YESSS!!” and “Oh my GOD!”, or in other words the intellectual vs emotional debate in my mind.

The intellectual half of my brain contains a list of all the things I’ve been thinking of – for the past few years – to park on my future retirement “To do” list, because I’ll have nothing but time. But the emotional half of my brain has taken precisely that same thought – nothing but time – but has put a big black capital “N” on “Nothing”.

Which isn’t true, of course. I don’t have nothing. I just need to take a bunch of that time to sort out what I do have.

I am not a person who has ever entirely defined either my identity or my sense of self-worth solely in terms of who I am at any particular job (most recently a Government of Canada Media Analyst). But the simple fact of my being a salaried worker with a specifically defined set of tasks and deadlines that must be fulfilled in order to receive a regular paycheque has certainly been the biggest section -- just not the only one -- of my "Who am I?" list for... well, pretty much my entire adult life.

I have several friends and former colleagues who traveled through the retirement gate before I did, and one consistent piece of advice they all offer is for the first couple months, do nothing. In fact, embrace doing nothing. Maybe even worship it!

Think, plan, plan and think some more. But don’t go out and join a bunch of groups to immediately re-fill your suddenly emptied 8:00 am to 4:00 pm daily timetable. Enjoy it as an extended holiday, my recently-retired friends have said. And to me that seems like really good advice.

Because at the moment, when I look at that list of things I’m finally able to do, I don’t have a clue where to begin.

I know that sounds like a ludicrous thing about which to be complaining, but human nature is such that a person – even a lazy person – requires a purpose.

During all the years I worked as a Media Analyst, for all my bitching and carping, my purpose was pretty plain. And boy can I give you a list of former supervisors and co-workers who will confirm that I bitched and carped with the worst of them! – about ridiculously short deadlines, about horribly-defined “BF”s (“Bring Forwards”, the collective name given to projects with fixed deadlines. Inevitably, we’d get BFs that required follow-up answers from the people who assigned the BF in the first place – usually in the Minister’s Office, who really should have known better. Can you, we’d bleat as the deadline came relentlessly closer, put more definition to the assignment than, say, “Give us an analysis of everything in the media over the past two years about Employment Insurance”?)

But one thing was always clear: no matter what the organization I was working for, and no matter what the specific project I was working on, I pretty much always knew at the end of each and every workday what I was going to be doing at the start of the following day.

When I worked in the private sector, it was for an Association governed by a Board of Directors (we called it a national Council). At one Council meeting I remember, one of our Councillors, from Nova Scotia (there’s something about the Atlantic air that makes people from that part of the country very pragmatic and wise) clearly ran out of patience and demanded that the Council get on with making a decision about something that had been debated to that point for several hours. “End the analysis paralysis”, was how he put it.

Transferring that to my present circumstance, that’s exactly where I am now, and so far my response to all this time and all those “To do” things has been so far not much better than a paralyzing, “Now what do I do?”

My brother, despite being two years younger than me, also beat me into retirement. Recently, when I had exactly this conversation with him, he said simply, “Just pick one”.

And to quote “Catch 22”’s Joseph Heller, “It makes about as much sense as anything else.”

Or maybe I should instead quote “Buckaroo Banzai” in his adventures across the Eighth Dimension (echoed in “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” and, imagine my surprise, first said by Confucius): “And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

So I’ll leave the last word for now to the intellectual half of my brain. At the end of the day, the month, the year, the decade... I’m going to be somewhere. My brother also tells me that after a few months, I’ll be wondering how in hell I ever found the time to go to work, my retirement days will be so full. I hope so; that sounds like fun!

I’ll be keeping you posted because one thing I have already discovered is that I love to write. But because my job involved copious amounts of writing, my recreational writing suffered accordingly. No more. Now you get to suffer by reading my spews!

I’m going to try to keep my future retirement ramblings to add-ons to blog posts, instead of turning the entire blog over to the subject. (That`s why it`s called a Retirement “Report” instead of a “journal” or “diary” – I want to emphasize they’ll only be occasional updates and I have no doubt you’ll all appreciate that. In fact, this is probably the longest such report you’ll read on the subject for many a month. But I wanted to use Glinda’s very good advice (above), and to start by putting a border around the roadmap.

To Oz!

A footnote: As this update was going to press, I received a birthday card from Leslie... and talk about timely! It has you, the reader, looking over a dog's shoulder as he, pencil in paw, contemplates his (wait for it) "To Do List". It reads: "1. Dig up flower beds; 2. Sit; 3. Stay; 4. Roam the neighbourhood; and 5. Sniff butts". Sounds like a pretty damned fine retirement plan to me! Just don't turn your back on me when next we meet face to... face. :-)

Until la prochaine.

Next time: If it comes with a label that says "collectible", it isn't. And my plan to revolutionize grocery shopping.