Musings on a Sunday in April

As tax time approaches many of us may think that it might be an option to live outside of Canada. My friends and I were talking about that recently. By moving to another country the idea is that you could instantly increase your retirement spending power. My neighbour lives in Costa Rica for a time every year and claims it is far cheaper than living in Canada. 

In Canada, we have many seniors, who we call Snowbirds, who travel south for the winter. Canadian law allows us to stay out of the country for up to almost 6 months without losing our health benefits. Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia and Panama all enjoy far better climate than we do, and much lower costs of living. 

According to International Living Magazine, you can live on one-half to one-third what you could in any Canadian city and have a good lifestyle in any one of their top places to retire to in the world. Here is a partial list of places they recommend Peru, Spain, Nicaragua, Portugal and the number one place in the world to retire is Costa Rica. For the full list go here

The federal government offers primers on retiring abroad (https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad  and find the link “Retirement Abroad”). This government site also offers many other great sources of information about living and retiring abroad. For example, they have some interesting information about coping with Culture Shock and paying taxes.

Another source of information is The Canadian Snowbird Guide by Douglas Gray. As we talked about the idea of retiring in another cheaper country, a friend suggested that it may be a good idea, but until you have lived in another country for a while, it might not be a good idea to pack up and leave permanently. His suggestion is to try out a destination before making any permanent decisions. Rent a home for a year and see what daily life is like. If it matches or exceeds your expectations, you may be able to afford the retirement of your dreams on far less money than you expected.

Time goes by so slowly or quickly depending on

I talked about my fall a few posts ago, and when I described the event, it seemed as if I was experiencing everything in slow motion. At a workshop on Fall Prevention about a week later, I asked how many had taken serious falls. Of the 40 people at the seminar 30 put up their hands. At the break, many talked to me about their experience and all talked about how they saw the event happening in slow motion.

This is a normal phenomenon; those who experience life-threatening events are most likely to believe that time expanded and that everything happened in slow motion, and they probably remembered the experience in vivid detail.

In a recent experiment, a scientist found that time doesn’t actually slow down when we’re fearing for our lives. Instead, scary and stressful situations send our amygdala – a part of the brain connected with memory and emotion – into overdrive. With the amygdala working in overdrive our brain records more detail than it normally does. We have, because of our amygdala working harder, rich, dense memories of those moments. This means when we review the experience, there’s a lot more stuff for us to see and or feel than normal, making the experience seem like it lasted longer.

Back to the observation, my wife made about time seeming to speed up as we grow older.  When we were young, everything was new and we were regularly engaging in new to us activities and new to us emotions. Because everything is new to us our brain was laying down the kind of rich, dense memories that stretched our perception of time.

As we age, we fall into routines and the idea “been there, done that” overtakes our thinking. As we age, we created the patterns of our lives and we created a series of routine day to day activities. If today is Friday, this is what will happen. We don’t have any reason to expend energy on capturing our repetitive and foreseeable morning travel or the eating of our turkey sandwich on Friday at work. Because we follow a routine our brain shuts off so when we review our lives there is a lack of rich detailed footage to think about, our life seems to have passed in a transitory haze.

Since our perception of time is a function of our brain, we have it in our power to slow down (or speed up) our perception of time. You can’t literally make your life longer (it would be great if we had this power), but we can make life seem longer. How, is this done? Regularly inject a little novelty into your life. As we get older, we can still seek out new horizons and new “firsts.” Here are some ideas to inject novelty into your life: 

·       If you wear a watch, try switching the wrist, you put your watch on

·       Changing around the arrangement of your furniture at home by trying Feng Shui 

·       Driving a different way to work or to your senior center

·       Learn a new language, skill, or hobby

·      Volunteer at your local Foodbank

·       Adopt or foster a new pet

·       Foster a child

·       Read a new genre of writing

·       Write a blog

As we mature and look back over our lives, my hope is that you have decades of new adventures, interesting events, fun family times, and holidays as well as new ideas and thoughts that make you think that your life has been long and well lived.

By increasing the novelty in your life, you may at the end, instead of seeing your life flash before your eyes, enjoy the satisfaction of watching it unhurriedly unfold and relish the sense of having fit several lifetimes into a single one.

The idea for this post came from The Art of Manliness — a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man.

Time goes by so slowly...

As we were driving home my wife said that time seems to be flying by, which is good because we are waiting for my daughter to come home for a visit. As our sense, that time was going faster meant that she would be here sooner. But it also meant that when she was here the time would go faster as well.

I know that as I get older time seems to be slip sliding away. Why does time seem to slow down when you’re young and speed up as you get older? There is a theory that claims this phenomenon is because when you’re younger, each year comprises a larger percentage of your total lifespan and thus feels more sizeable; one year is 1/14 of your life when you’re fourteen, but only 1/40 when you’re 40. That’s a fun theory, but there’s an actual neural cause for how our perception of time changes over time.

Time, according to our scientists, is a fixed dimension. Time can be broken into minutes, seconds, and nanoseconds, and can be objectively measured. However many of us have internal clocks which often do an excellent job of tracking time; if I asked you to guess the time right now, you’d probably be pretty close.

Depending on where we are and what we are doing, time may seem to contract or expand, speed up or slow down. In contrast to our other senses like touch and taste, which are located in specific parts of our brains, our sense of time is woven throughout our neural matter. We understand time as a concept and since it is an overriding concept, our perception of time is tied up with our emotions and memories. 

Time is an abstract construction of our brain. We love stories and we love stories that are linear, that is they have a beginning, middle and an end. So as events unfold around us or to us, we sift through and our brain tries to put the best most interesting and useful story of what is happening. One of the ways our brain does this is by editing and lengthening or shortening events to fit the story we are creating.

Assumptions, values and belief 2

As I wrote earlier, we live in a reality of assumptions I suggested you make a list of the assumptions you make about your personal life and journey. Then choose one of the fundamental assumptions and ask yourself what you would do if that assumption were to become invalid. This can happen more easily than you realize, usually for one of these reasons:

1.  A new, previously unknown, a person comes into your life and completely changes your worldview. In industry, the music industry assumed people would always listen to music on CD’s or records. That assumption became invalid once digital music and online sharing became available. The press assumed people would always buy and read newspapers until the web made more news available less expensively to everyone everywhere. 
2. A life-changing event, it could be the death of a spouse, a chronic illness, a fall that leads to hospitalization, the flu, a divorce. Any and or all of these changes can threaten your view of the world and challenge the assumptions you hold about your place in the world.
3. Changes in legislation can damage and even destroy society and our relationships. Canada and the US were once known for welcoming immigrants, but today in the United States, people seeking asylum are seen as dangerous criminals and our society is rejecting the idea that immigration is positive for our society. Neighbours, family and friends who have different views on immigration are no longer speaking. 

Look at the underlying assumptions of your life, choose one and ask yourself, what you would do if that assumption became invalid. Exercises such as these are useful not simply to have a contingency plan in case someone else does something to disrupt your life, but also as a means of coming up with a creative vision that might enable you to disrupt your worldview! After all, it is better to be in charge than the victim of change, is it not?

As you grew and took on more responsibilities in life, such as work, a life-partner, children, ageing, and mortgages to name some, it is easy to live a life that is controlled by assumptions rather than your true self. One of the most common assumptions people tend to make is that they need to earn as much income as possible for their families. As a result, we work long hours, bring work home, answer email at the dinner table and neglect the family in hopes of getting promotions and salary increase. 

When you retire this following could be your reality. Imagine your income is only half as much as have now.  How would you have to change your life to make that work? How much more could you do for your family in such a situation?

Very likely, your creative vision will be a lot more desirable than the creative vision that involves having a lot more money, a bigger house and a nicer car; none of which you can enjoy since you are working long hours to pay for all of them!

Boomers are divorcing at an alarming rate. Among U.S. adults ages 50 and older, the divorce rate has roughly doubled since the 1990s, according to a Pew Research Center report. If you have been in a long and comfortable relationship, you probably assume that your partner will stay with you forever. So, imagine the scenario in which your partner leaves you. Why might she (or he, of course) do that? What could you have done to make her want to stay with you? How could you have made the relationship better for her?

Needless-to-say, taking action on these ideas will only delight your partner, even if he/she has no intention of leaving you!