People ask me at least once a week about being retired. “Do you enjoy it? Or “Do you find enough to
do?” Or “Do you miss going to work every day?”
For the record, the answers are “Yes!” “Yes!” and “Are you kidding?” People keep asking, though, because they hear
about other folks who retired who struggle with it.
Search the Internet with the phrase "advice for
planning retirement" and you’ll find a list of articles about financial
planning. People think about preparing
for the monetary part of retirement, and if they’re fortunate the finances come
together. But they often don’t think
about what retirement will mean for their daily experience. In my experience, how I prepared to use my time
was as important as how I prepared financially.
I was fortunate to have had a career that I enjoyed and that
I found fulfilling. Not every day (or
sometimes month) was rainbows and daisies, but it was a good way to have spent
a working life. As an educator who spent
a third of his career in as a junior high and high school teacher and the last
two-thirds in community colleges and universities, I contributed to people’s
lives and helped them dream and build their futures in small increments. I even helped a few institutions move forward
and think of the ways that they served or didn’t serve learners.
I still continue to do that on a smaller scale, as I advise a
few doctoral candidates as they complete their dissertations, consult with
institutions on issues and programs, conduct studies that I find interesting,
and write and edit articles that I believe are important for the
profession. So I haven’t disassociated
from my professional life. But what I
have now is the flexibility to do the work that’s important to me without the
demands of a job that requires me to be in certain places, doing certain tasks,
and working at certain times. In brief,
I control my own life with few demands from external sources.
Because I control my own life, I also decide how better to
balance my professional life with my personal enjoyments. When I’m not isolated from a pandemic, I can
take time on a week night to meet a friend to play music without worrying about
getting up early for work the next morning.
Or I can take a motorcycle trip along the Olympic Peninsula on a week
day. Or I can take the time to work on
something I’m building, and if I don’t like my work, I can undo it and
start over. Or I can just relax at home,
or have a standing, virtual cocktail party with friends from around the country
– without worrying that some work demand will interfere. After 46 years, three months, and 27 days of
having a job that scheduled my life, now I’m scheduling my life. That’s an incredible gift that I see as a
privilege and a responsibility as I use my time. If you haven’t yet deduced this, though, I’m
really enjoying retirement. So I write
this in order to pass along some wise advice I received that helped me prepare.
My already retired colleagues encouraged me, most
importantly, to build what I think of as an off-ramp to retirement. It’s important to think about retirement not
being a finite point, but, rather, as a continuation, just like a freeway
off-ramp isn’t a dead end. That’s why I continue
to have professional activities. I’ve
been consulting on the side for 25 years.
In the first year of retirement, my consulting practice had its busiest
year ever, and its tapered a little from that in the last two years. I don’t see that work continuing forever into
the future. But that helped me have an
outlet for the professional energy that I maintained for a very long time
during my career.
Similarly, finishing out my doctoral candidates allows me to
continue a teaching relationship with each of them – a relationship that I find
incredibly satisfying. Also, conducting
a few studies, co-editing an issue of a professional journal, and co-writing
some articles all allow me to make contributions to my profession, while I’m
also mentoring the people who are working with me on these projects and helping
them to gain publications that gain them status in our profession. As I left my job and the part of identity it
provided, these were the components of the off-ramp that allowed me to develop
a new self-identity that’s not that much different than the one I’ve had for a
long time.
In my personal life, that off-ramp began about seven years
ago as I built a music studio behind the house.
We have a small house, and there’s no space for the Hammond organ and
other instruments I play with (note the phrase “play with” as opposed to
“play”). Four years ago, I replaced the
older motorcycle I was riding with one that is better suited for touring
because being on the open road helps me to meditate on life. Then two years ago, we finally demolished our
ramshackle garage and replaced it with a much larger one where I built a
workbench with space for tools and working.
The off-ramp also includes people – its most important
component. My wife and I’ve been
fortunate to have made deep and lasting friendships over the years of married
life. Also, we both have family members who
are important to us. Although we only
see some of those friends and family periodically, maintaining our connection
to them grounds us in an understanding of the significance of human
contact. That’s part of the off-ramp
that we started building a long time ago, and it’s one that we continue to
build as we now have more time to nurture relationships.
Okay. I understand
that some of what I describe about building the off-ramp to retirement takes
money. In our case, it was the good
fortune to have the resources to make choices a few years back. As we had some extra dollars, we would invest
in the off-ramp (e.g., building the studio or replacing the motorcycle with a
newer one). But that’s not any different
than what we did in paying into our retirement accounts. It was a conscious decision to understand
that our lives were about to change and that we needed to prepare for that
change. In return for this opportunity,
we try to live responsibly in the world around us because we understand how
fortunate we have been to prepare for this time.
Like I said, I didn’t come up with this off-ramp idea. I learned it by listening to and watching
others. None of the people who taught me
did exactly what I’m doing because who they are and how they did it are all
different. The friend who retired and
spent five years as a consultant with various companies providing his
expertise. The colleague who began a new
research center after his retirement in his late 50s and then spent 30+ years
managing that. The neighbor who was a carpenter
and now helps people with construction projects. There are also people I know who have made
their hobbies their life, or have completely reinvented themselves in
retirement. The key is that they had
lives that extended from who they were to whom they became. They built an off-ramp.
So in my third year, I’m still becoming. It’s interesting that I had plans to do
things that I haven’t yet done. I’m okay
with them never getting done. Unlike my
professional life, my goals now are now more fluid and less about an end
product than they are about the experiences.
For now, I’m enjoying this latest episode of life, and I’m looking
forward to seeing what it brings next as I transition through this off-ramp to whatever
the fully retired me will be. It seems
to me that it’s never too late to start building that off-ramp. Even if you’re retired already, you can start
thinking of ways to bridge from where you are to where you could be. My wife, for example, has taken up indoor
gardening of late as a way to extend her enjoyment of seeing things grow
without the demands of yard work. The
key, it seems to me, is to build forward to what’s next instead of looking back
to see what isn’t. After all, going to
what’s next is what off-ramps provide us.
