Soft Landings

In today's Boston Globe there was a nicely done essay by Susan Trausch.  You can read it if you click here.  She took a buyout from the Globe five years ago at age 59.  After 32 years at the same company, her transition from work to retirement was "complicated."    She has written a book* about her personal period of adjustment, (which I plan to read if I ever have any free time.)

The op-ed piece titled "Retirement's Soft Landings" offers a bit of tongue-in-cheek advice to celebrities who have publicly announced their imminent retirement (Oprah, Joe Torre, Richard Daly).

Trausch nails it when she talks about the  bitter-sweet transition after waving goodbye to your career and workmates,

" Oh the tyranny of time managed poorly. The tyranny of time at work was so different, mainly because time was in charge and knew what it was doing. There were bosses, assignments, schedules, deadlines, and a gross domestic product to consider. At home there is complete freedom and an easily distracted human being can spend days drifting from leaky garden hose to unread New Yorkers to hunting for the grocery list that must have blown off the counter to e-mail to the daily crossword puzzle that is supposed to keep the mind focused"

As faithful readers of this blog well know, your humble scribe has been wrestling with retirement issues since he escaped from the hellhole several years ago.  As one who has never been bored, I found retirement to be exceedingly liberating.  Suddenly, no one is telling you what to do, where to be, what time to show-up, and how to get there.  You think: This is how life should be!  

I changed the name of the blog from "Hellhole Update" to "Escape from the Hellhole" to celebrate the new found feeling of having emerged from a cage.  I was happy, delighted and at peace.  Now I was free to do anything I wanted to do.  Fishing, traveling, reading, meeting friends for lunch, catching up on the lengthy to-do list... And I did enjoy doing those things.

But having all that freedom is not without it's drawbacks.  When people ask me, "How do you like retirement?" my answer is: "Overall I am delighted to be at leisure.  However, every few months, I get this vague feeling that I am missing something, that I am not doing anything important.  I start to worry (again) that the missus and me will outlive our nest egg." 
I have probably bored my loyal readers with the recurrent observation that most normal adults  do not experience unqualified happiness for very long (and this is well explained by Maslow's theory, The Hierarchy of Needs).     Our brains are creative goal-seeking mechanisms, so we cannot be satisfied with the status quo, because new goals keep forming as long as the brain is functioning.  (Hmmn, maybe this last condition explains why some people are deliriously happy in retirement. )

Fortunately, this "uncertain phase" does not last for very long**.  I usually respond to the vague noodgy feelings of insignificance by looking at part time job ads for high paying opportunities within walking distance of home.  There are virtually no part time jobs, unless you want to become a replaceable part, working for an indecent hourly wage, on the worst shift.  So, I usually get over this phase pretty quickly.  Then, I make some lunch plans or go fishing. 
And, for a time,  all is right with the world.

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*Trausch's newly published book: "Groping Toward Whatever Or How I Learned To Retire, Sort Of.’’

** My wife attributes this "uncertainty" to mild seasonal depression. She was an English major in college but feels that she is  fully qualified to diagnose my mental state.