Enjoying Retirement — Living Life

I’m closing my freelance writing business. It’s been a bit more than five years since my retirement from the corporate world and I find, now at age 68, that it’s time to spend my time enjoying life and treasuring my family.

I feel that the final detoxification from “living to work” came during our recent Alaska Cruise. It was time away from nearly everything and I could really enjoy watching my wife’s delight at the wildlife and the opulent cruise life. I could stay in that mode, for sure.

Living to Work

When I was retired in 2013, at age 63, I had not begun to truly contemplate retirement. You could easily say that my life was focused on work — beginning as a pre-teen working with my dad and grandfather in their grocery store. Plus, I’d watched my grandfather sell his store at 65 and die just six months later. Retiring didn’t seem like the best idea — particularly if you could be productive and make a strong contribution to your organization.

My vague thought over most of my career was that 70 might be a good time. As the corporate world relentlessly sought aggressive confusion and the resulting disability, I was beginning to think that 67 might work. Then came the events that gave me retirement at 63. Many would value the opportunity, but of course when you live to work, it seems like a disaster.

As I looked for a new job, I relatively quickly learned that 60 something people were not being hired, particularly senior executives. See my blog post Age Bias. But, you can create your own job, which I did with freelance writing. Fortunately, I found some great clients and inspiring projects. Plus, I captured that job search knowledge and my own experience in the hiring process in a book, Job Search Essentials, that I wrote with my daughter, Brooke DePue.

Gaining Comfort in Retirement

My daughter Kyla, during our recent Alaska cruise, messaged me that I was “enjoying the retirement I’d worked so hard for.” As you can tell from the story so far, I’d really never worked for retirement. I even thought it was bad form to focus on retirement. Instead, you needed to focus on the job at hand, always advancing, or at least making ever greater contributions to the corporate goals and to your personal career goals.

As an example of this mindset, I’d earned a bachelor’s degree at 35, MA in Management at 37, MBA in finance at 42, and added a marketing concentration at 47. Continuous improvement in my work was a relentless focus.

I’m reminded of Charles Dickens’ superb The Child’s Story, that I’ve recorded as an audio podcast. The gist is that our lives go through phases. He captures them perfectly: the child, always at play; the boy, always learning; the young man, always in love; the middle-aged gentleman, always busy; the old man, always remembering. I’m now close to the always remembering category — although there is a fair bit of always busy around my own projects, including ham radio.

Choosing What I Do

Thanks to sound investments and a pension (yes those still exist in a few organizations), my financial situation is reasonably strong. Initially, I didn’t quite feel that way. After all, where was my paycheck that I’d been earning since my pre-teen days? But gradually, I came to realize how fortunate my wife and I are.

Then in my freelance writing business I started to better understand projects and clients, or perhaps better said view them from a different perspective. At that point I began to decide in each case that the battle ahead was not worth it to me. From time to time, I still see a few projects that look interesting, but I get over it pretty quickly. Even while I write this, it doesn’t seem right after 50 years of work, that I’d be able to make this choice. But that too I have overcome — and it feels good.

Always Busy

You may have heard many retirees say they don’t know how they coped before they retired, since they have so much on their agenda every single day. Most of that is attending to family or working in volunteer roles. I have that as well.

For me, it’s amateur radio projects at home as well as working on volunteer publishing projects. Another big aspect is combining Scouting activities and amateur radio, with Jamboree on the Air. The latter gets me involved at the local, national, and world levels of Scouting. It’s nice to be able and in a position to make those contributions.

But by far the better choice has been spending time with my dear wife. The cruise is the high-level example, but perhaps better yet are the days we carve out for a weekend away to a new place, or just the day that we spare from the “always busy” to take in lunch, a movie, a drink, and a light dinner. Spending our time together — as we dreamed about when we married.

So What’s Happening with PathForeWord?

I’ve moved a small subset of PathForeWord content to this website under the Writing menu item. That includes my overview information, eBooks, and a small highlights portfolio. I’m also closing the website/blog and redirecting the URLs to this website’s PathForeWord information. And, I’m closing PathForeWord social media accounts.

I will continue from time-to-time writing career focused blog posts on LinkedIn and maintaining the company page. I can’t go completely cold turkey, at least right now.

Time to Move On

There does come a time to move on. Just as in Dicken’s story, we do move on regardless of our own wishes. And, that time has come for my writing business and soon it will come for some of my volunteer efforts.

It becomes time for new ideas, new approaches, that are not necessarily better, but are driven with new energy and new thoughts by new people who have the drive to build their own PathForeWord.

Good luck to you in your PathForeWord. I hope this blog post has given you some ideas on making your own journey and finding the right path.