Easing into retirement?

Before I retired, I did not think too much about what retirement would mean. My wife after a profoundly serious brain operation and a year-long recovery decided to retire. She told me she was going to retire and so I put in my one-month notice so I would retire at the same time as she did so we could travel to Australia. She thought I had made a big mistake, and after we returned from our trip, I realized that I had made a huge mistake, and I went back to work. 

Over the next seven years, I worked part-time, then full time and then part-time again. I realized very quickly that I needed to ease into retirement. So, if you want to have a good retirement, you need to figure out what that means to you and what you want to do before you retire. I was lucky I had a skill set that was in short supply and I could go back to work, easily and could take the kind of assignments that I wanted, and refuse the ones I did not like, not everyone is so lucky.

I have now been fully retired for 7 years, and I was partially retired for 7 years. During the last 7 years, I realized that what you do when you are retired, impacts your health, wealth, and overall happiness. I have been fortunate because I have stayed healthy. I have lost friends to Alzheimer’s, and more friends to other critical illnesses. During the Pandemic, we self-isolated for six months and slowly opened our bubble up to others, but we still restrict our social gatherings and are cautious when going out.

Different people have different ideas about having a successful retirement. I know of a few people, who are in their late 80’s who now have the time and the attitude that they can sit up and watch the rest of the world go by. But these people are in the minority. Many of the people I know in their late 80’s are slowing down but they are not stopping. Most of the people I know have come to the realization that retirement is a time for embarking on a great journey and having some interesting adventures. After they have adjusted to being retired, they realize that they have the time to do what they want with the experience-laden good sense to appreciate it.

What do you do to exercise?

What do you do to exercise? I used to be a long-distance runner.  When I was running I became lost in my own world, listening to my breathing, feeling the rhythm of my feet as they touched the ground, and listening to the music and poetry that my subconscious mind created. When I ran, I knew I was alive and well; with each race I completed I felt good. Today I still know that I can maintain my health but not through running, due to my arthritis. But I can still walk. We all need to move, and we know it and we need to make time for it daily or weekly. Once exercise and movement become a habit it will be hard to break. What works for you?

I don’t have a FitBit, but I have a new phone that has an app that keeps track of my steps and calories burned. If you have even a bit of a competitive streak, try a FitBit, or another step counter. I have had my phone for less than six months and have used it every day. I find it really works, and I no longer have a real competitive streak.

On my phone, I can see the graph of my weeks' steps, see how many steps I average a day. The phone actually motivates me to move more, although I rarely reach 10,000 steps a day I usually reach my goal of 5,000 steps and reach at least 10,000 steps once or twice a week

I asked some friends of mine to find out what they did and here are some of the response I received

“I get outside for an early walk each day.  45-60 minutes.”

“I go for a bike ride with my son.  Or walk again in the evenings.”

“I've started lifting weights now. Just dumbbells, nothing fancy”.

“When I exercise I use my stationary bike and basement treadmill.”

“For years I've been walking daily while listening with headphones to books on my iPhone.  I try to walk up hills and to walk for at least 75-90 minutes to get enough exercise”

What do you do?

Salute to a brave and modest nation

My friend George sent me this on Friday, it was written by Kevin Myers, The Sunday Telegraph, London.

Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops are deployed in the region.

And as always, Canada will bury its dead, just as the rest of the world, as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does. It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored.

Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts.

For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet it's purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, it's unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the 'British.'

The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone.

Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world. The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time.

Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality -unless that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter, Mike Weir and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British.

It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces.

Canadian soldiers in the past half-century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?

Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost. This past year more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.

Lest we forget.

*********************

Please share this with any of your friends or relatives who served in the Canadian Forces or anyone who is proud to be Canadian; it is a wonderful tribute to those who choose to serve their country and the world in our quiet Canadian way.

What is old?

I have asked this question before are you old, a senior, a Zoomer or a Boomer. I was struck by how we use the word old or elder when we were examining some of our workshop material. The word old, with its connotations of deterioration and obsolescence, doesn’t capture the many different arcs a human life can trace after middle age.

 Boomers are reinventing what it means to be old, as I have long said, Older adults now have the most diverse life experiences of any age group, Some are us are working, some are retired, some are hitting the gym every day, others suffer from chronic disabilities. Some are travelling around the world, some are raising their grandchildren and they represent as many as three different generations. There’s no one term that can conjure up that variety. But we need labels as it makes things easy for us in society.

 So. if 65-year-olds—or 75-year-olds, or 85-year-olds—aren’t “old,” what are they?  One term I have heard to describe us is “older”. The word is gaining popularity not because it is perfect—it presents problems of its own—but because it seems to be the least imperfect of the many descriptors English speakers have at their disposal.

 Senior is one of the most common euphemisms for old people and it implies that people who receive the label are different, and somehow lesser, than those who don’t.

 What about “elders” which is a term of respect in our Aboriginal communities, but in broader society elder is often associated with frailty and limitation, and older people, at least the ones I know, generally don’t identify with it.

 Zoomer is a word that a Canadian entrepreneur uses to describe our age group and he has a TV show, a radio station and print magazines with that title. It does him well, but I am not sure how many of us identity as Zoomers.

There are other Euphemisms, too: References to one’s “golden years” and to old people as “sages” or “super adults” strain to gloss over the realities of old age. “Phrases such as ‘70 is the new 50’ reflect a ‘positive ageing’ discourse, which suggests that the preferred way of being old is to not be old at all, but rather to maintain some image of middle-age functionality and appearance

A term that is gaining popularity according to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and an author is an older person. That’s according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a database of more than 600 million words collected from newspapers, novels, speeches, and other sources. The database also indicates that elderly, mature, and ageing have been falling in popularity over the past 30 years.

Replacements for all these existing terms—older as well as the words it’s gradually displacing—have been proposed over the years. For at least a couple of decades, gerontological researchers have been making a distinction between the young-old (typically those in their 60s and 70s) and the old old (definitions vary, but 85 and up is common). Another academic term is third age, which refers to the period after retirement but before the fourth age of infirmity and decline (which some would argue unjustly legitimizes distinctions based on physical abilities). But none of these has caught on outside the realms of academic research and op-eds.

Ideally, a definition of old age would capture a sense of things ending, or at least getting closer to ending. All those people who call 65 “middle-aged” isn’t delusional—they probably just don’t want to be denied their right to have ambitions and plans for the stretch of their life that’s still ahead of them, even if that stretch is a lot shorter than the one behind them.