Retirement: The Beginning of the Adventure

When you first start thinking about retirement, it can feel a little like standing at the edge of a forest you have never explored.

Behind you is the familiar path.

You know where it goes.

You know when to get up, where you need to be, what people expect from you and, perhaps most importantly, who you are in the eyes of the world.

Then suddenly the path changes.

Retirement arrives.

And there you are, standing at the edge of something new.

It is only natural to feel vulnerable.

You may wonder what you are leaving behind.

Your paycheque.

Your title.

Your routine.

The people you worked with.

The feeling that you were needed in a particular way.

Perhaps you even wonder what you will talk about when someone asks, "What do you do?"

Those are real questions.

But there is another question we don't ask often enough.

"What might I gain?"

Because here is the remarkable thing about retirement:

Never again, at any other point in this particular journey, will you have so much to gain.

Think about that for a moment.

For much of your working life, your choices were shaped by responsibility.

You had bills to pay.

Children to raise.

Jobs to keep.

Meetings to attend.

Places you had to be.

People who needed you.

Your calendar was often somebody else's calendar.

Retirement doesn't erase responsibility, but it can give you something you may not have had for decades.

Choice.

You can decide what matters now.

You can discover interests you never had time to explore.

You can spend a Tuesday morning reading a book without feeling guilty.

You can take a walk simply because the weather is beautiful.

You can volunteer.

Learn something.

Travel.

Write.

Golf.

Dance.

Join a group.

Call an old friend.

Make a new one.

Or do absolutely nothing for an hour and discover that the world continues to turn.

That last one can take some practice.

We have spent so many years measuring our value by what we accomplish that simply being present can feel strangely uncomfortable.

But perhaps retirement asks us to learn a different way of measuring a life.

Not by productivity.

By participation.

Not by how much we accomplish.

By how much we experience.

Not by the size of our bank account.

By the richness of our relationships.

Not by how busy we are.

By whether we are awake to the life happening around us.

This brings me back to the forest.

A forest does not retire.

It doesn't stop being useful because it reaches a certain age.

The old trees provide shelter.

The fallen trees become homes.

Seeds become new trees.

Everything remains part of the larger story.

We are like that.

Retirement is not the moment when we stop contributing.

It is a change in how we contribute.

Perhaps you will have more time to listen to someone who needs to talk.

Perhaps you will volunteer.

Perhaps you will help a grandchild discover something.

Perhaps you will teach what you know.

Perhaps you will finally write the book that has been sitting in your head for thirty years.

Perhaps you will discover that you are much more than the job you once held.

And there will be surprises.

There always are.

Some will be wonderful.

Some won't.

You may discover talents you didn't know you possessed.

You may discover limitations you didn't expect.

You may lose some things.

You may gain others.

That is life.

We cannot walk into a forest and demand that every tree, path and view remain exactly as we imagined.

We have to be curious.

We have to look around.

We have to notice.

We have to keep moving.

And occasionally, we have to laugh at ourselves.

Especially when we take the wrong path.

I have taken enough wrong turns in life to know that they are not always disasters.

Sometimes they lead somewhere interesting.

Perhaps retirement should be approached the same way.

Don't expect to have everything figured out on day one.

You don't need a ten-year master plan.

You need enough curiosity to take the next step.

You are not walking toward the end of the trail.

You are walking into a part of the forest you have never seen before.

And that should make you a little nervous.

But it should also make you smile.

Because the greatest adventure of your life may not be behind you.

It may be waiting just around the next bend.

Happiness Is Not a Place We Arrive

For most of my life, I have heard people talk about happiness as though it were a destination.

One day, they say, I will be happy.

When I retire.

When I have enough money.

When I lose some weight.

When my health improves.

When the children are settled.

When I travel.

When I finally have time.

There always seems to be something between us and happiness.

So we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

The problem is that happiness doesn't seem to live where we think it does.

I have spent enough time walking through forests to understand that the forest doesn't have a destination.

A tree doesn't wake up in the morning thinking, "If I can just become a bigger tree, I'll finally be happy."

It simply grows.

It reaches.

It responds to sunlight and rain.

It bends in the wind.

It loses branches.

It grows new ones.

It lives.

Perhaps we could learn something from that.

We often think happiness means getting everything we want.

But the older I get, the less convincing that idea becomes.

Some of the happiest moments in my life have been surprisingly ordinary.

A good conversation.

A walk.

A cup of coffee.

A laugh shared with someone I love.

A book I couldn't put down.

A song that suddenly took me somewhere I hadn't been for years.

A morning when nothing particularly important happened and yet everything felt right.

Happiness often arrives quietly.

It doesn't always knock on the door.

Sometimes it slips in through a crack.

The trouble is, we are often too busy looking for the big version of happiness to notice the small version sitting beside us.

We want the extraordinary.

Life keeps offering us the ordinary.

And sometimes the ordinary is extraordinary enough.

There is another lesson the forest teaches.

Nothing stays the same.

The beautiful summer afternoon becomes autumn.

The leaves fall.

Winter arrives.

Then spring.

If happiness depended on everything remaining pleasant, we would spend much of our lives unhappy.

But perhaps happiness is not the absence of difficulty.

Perhaps it is the ability to remain open to life while difficulty is present.

That doesn't mean pretending everything is fine.

It isn't.

Life can be painful.

People we love become ill.

Friends die.

Plans collapse.

Our bodies betray us.

Dreams change.

There are days when happiness is simply not available.

And we don't need to manufacture it.

But even in difficult seasons, there can be moments of grace.

A kind word.

A beautiful sky.

A friend who shows up.

A song.

A memory.

A laugh that catches us by surprise.

The trick may be learning to notice them.

I have come to believe that happiness has less to do with possession and more to do with participation.

You don't have to own the forest to enjoy walking through it.

You don't have to own a song to be moved by it.

You don't have to possess a moment to be grateful for it.

And you don't have to understand life completely to love being alive.

That last one may be the hardest.

We want answers.

We want certainty.

We want to know where everything is going.

But perhaps the essence of happiness begins when we accept that we don't know.

There I am again, walking through the forest, looking for some grand answer.

And eventually I realize I have missed the point.

The answer isn't waiting somewhere ahead.

It is happening around me.

The trees.

The wind.

The light.

The sound of my own footsteps.

The person I love.

The life I have been given.

For a moment, I stop trying to understand it.

I simply stand there.

And I get it.

Of course, the moment I get it, I want to keep it.

I want to put it in a bottle.

I want to take it home.

I want to make sure tomorrow feels exactly like today.

But I can't.

The wind moves.

The light changes.

The moment passes.

And I let it go.

Maybe that is happiness.

Not holding on to life.

But being awake enough to experience it while it is here.

We are all part of the same great unfolding mystery.

We always have been.

And perhaps the happiest thing we can do is stop standing outside it, waiting for life to begin.

Step inside.

It already has.

Love Is Something We Cannot Keep

We spend a great deal of time talking about love.

We write songs about it.

We write poems about it.

We make movies about it.

We give people cards covered with hearts.

And yet, after all these centuries of talking about love, I am not sure we understand it any better.

Perhaps we are trying too hard.

Love is one of those things that becomes difficult to explain when we actually experience it.

You can describe what it means to love someone.

You can list the things you appreciate about them.

You can tell stories about the first time you met.

But the description is never quite the thing itself.

Love is something you enter.

You discover it in the small moments.

A cup of coffee made without asking.

A hand reaching across the bed.

Someone remembering how you take your tea.

A phone call just to say, "I was thinking about you."

A husband and wife who have been together for decades and still laugh at the same silly joke.

Love isn't always dramatic.

In fact, some of the deepest love in our lives is almost invisible.

It lives in routines.

In patience.

In forgiveness.

In showing up.

In staying when staying is difficult.

Perhaps that is why growing older can teach us something about love that youth cannot.

When we are young, we often think love is about finding someone.

As we grow older, we discover that love is much more about becoming someone.

Someone who listens.

Someone who gives.

Someone who understands that the person beside us is not ours to possess.

That last part is difficult.

We want to keep the people we love.

Of course we do.

When something matters deeply to us, we want to put our arms around it and hold it close.

We want to make sure nothing changes.

But everything changes.

People change.

Relationships change.

Circumstances change.

Our bodies change.

Eventually, every relationship encounters the truth that nothing is permanent.

The forest understands this better than we do.

Trees lose branches.

Leaves fall.

Old growth becomes new growth.

Nothing is wasted.

Everything becomes part of something else.

Perhaps love works that way too.

The love we give to our children becomes part of who they become.

The love we give a friend may carry them through a difficult year.

The kindness we offer a stranger may be remembered long after we have forgotten offering it.

Love moves through us.

It doesn't necessarily belong to us.

That may be one of the reasons love can hurt so much.

We discover that loving someone does not give us control over what happens to them.

We can care deeply and still lose.

We can love someone and still disagree.

We can love someone and still have to let them go.

And yet letting go does not erase the love.

Sometimes it proves how real it was.

I think that is one of the great mysteries of growing older.

We become more aware of impermanence, but we can also become more capable of appreciating the moment.

The conversation at the kitchen table.

The walk around the neighbourhood.

The familiar voice.

The hand in ours.

The ordinary Tuesday that, years later, we would give anything to have again.

Maybe the essence of love is not holding on.

Maybe it is being fully present while we have the privilege of holding someone close.

And when the moment changes, as all moments do, we carry the love forward.

Not in a bottle.

Not in a photograph.

Not even entirely in memory.

We carry it in who we have become.

And perhaps that is the one place love can never really be lost.

The Poem We Are Already Living

I used to think poetry was something written on a page.

Words arranged carefully.

Lines broken in particular places.

Metaphors.

Rhymes.

Images.

When I was in teacher training one of our assignments was to go into the forest and create a poem. Doing that  began to understand that poetry doesn't necessarily begin with words.

Sometimes it begins with noticing.

A branch

A sunrise.

A child's laugh.

An old photograph.

The smell of the pines

The smell of bread coming from a kitchen.

Two people holding hands after sixty years together.

A man sitting alone on a park bench watching leaves fall.

A woman laughing so hard that she forgets to be embarrassed.

Maybe poetry is what happens when we stop rushing past these things.

We talk about poetry as though it is something we need to understand.

We analyze it.

We explain it.

We ask what the poet meant.

But there are some poems that become smaller when we explain them.

The same thing happens with life.

We want to understand everything.

Why did this happen?

Why did that person leave?

Why did I get sick?

Why didn't that dream work out?

Why did something wonderful happen when I wasn't expecting it?

We spend years trying to answer questions that may not have answers.

Then one day, usually when we are no longer looking for them, we notice something.

Perhaps the question wasn't the point.

The experience was.

I think about this when walking through a forest.

There is no explanation for a particular shaft of sunlight falling through the trees.

It simply happens.

There is no committee meeting deciding which bird should sing next.

There is no master schedule telling the leaves when to turn.

Everything is unfolding.

And we are unfolding with it.

That may be one of the hardest things about getting older.

We become very aware of how much we have lost.

People.

Places.

Opportunities.

Strength.

Dreams.

Versions of ourselves.

We can spend a great deal of time looking backward and wondering how things might have been different.

But perhaps the forest offers another lesson.

A tree doesn't spend the autumn arguing with the summer.

It lets go.

The leaf falls.

The branch remains.

And eventually, spring arrives in a form the tree has never experienced before.

There is something deeply poetic about that.

Our lives are full of endings that become beginnings.

Retirement ends one chapter.

Grandparenthood begins another.

A move changes our relationship with a familiar place.

A health challenge changes what we thought was possible.

Losing someone changes us forever.

None of these experiences are simple.

But neither are they the whole story.

We are always becoming.

That doesn't mean everything gets better.

It means everything keeps changing.

And somewhere in that change is the possibility of wonder.

I have learned that wonder requires a shift in attention.

You can walk through the same park every day and see the same trees.

Or you can suddenly notice that one of them has a nest you had never seen before.

The park hasn't changed.

You have.

That may be what poetry asks of us.

Look again.

Listen again.

Slow down.

Notice.

The poem may already be there.

It may be in the face of the person sitting across the breakfast table.

It may be in the hand of a grandchild reaching for yours.

It may be in the friend who calls when you didn't expect anyone to call.

It may be in the quiet after the rain.

It may even be in the difficult parts of life.

We don't have to like every line.

We don't have to understand every stanza.

But we are living the poem.

And perhaps the essence of poetry is not finding the perfect words for life.

Perhaps it is learning to pay attention to the life we already have.