A few of the passages I’ve highlighted recently while reading about retirement specifically and healthy, vibrant aging in general:
The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.
– Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks
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This new stage of life gives us the opportunity . . . to make more time for being, amid the doing. More time for reflection, for relationships, for enjoyment of diverse activities. Choosing activities for the sheer pleasure or satisfaction of doing them, rather than as a means to achieve a goal, or for status, or recognition.
We don’t need to feel busy or productive to feel authentic anymore. Even when we are still working hard to care for parents or for a partner, or to earn income we badly need, we can still make time to enjoy the pauses. We can move more deliberately, take our time experiencing people, places, and moments more fully. . . . We can be less motivated by ‘shoulds’ and ‘have tos,’ and more by ‘want tos.’ Often, a good phrase for now is, ‘I am old enough not to have to do that!’
– Rabbi Rachel Cowan & Dr. Linda Thal, Wise Aging
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What I would have seen as self-indulgent a few years ago now feels self-nurturing.
– Joan Price, 65 Things to do When Your Retire
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[A]ging is an opportunity for growth, discovery, and new meaning. As an opportunity for us to do some of the most important inner work of our lives. During this stage of adulthood, we can live more deeply and turn away from superficiality. . . . Those who are not open to change risk missing out on the great opportunity of their stage in life.
– Rabbi Rachel Cowan & Dr. Linda Thal, Wise Aging
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We can’t bear the idea of doing nothing, but we don’t know what to do. In fact, it’s not all that hard, it’s just unfamiliar, which reads as hard. “Harry [Henry S. Lodge] uses this wonderful metaphor about how career paths for the young are actually superhighways, carefully marked with huge, legible signs: GO TO COLLEGE, TAKE THIS EXIT TO PROCTER & GAMBLE, BECOME A USEFUL COG IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY. But, he says, the paths of retirement are back roads or country lanes, with no signs to tell you where to go. Or who to be. No role models. No norms of behavior and no support organizations. In time, if you do it somewhere near right, you’ll come to appreciate the beauty of the paths, their comparative calm – and the fact that you have so many, many options to do whatever you want. But it takes a while. And it takes some work.
– Chris Crowley, Younger Next Year
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Our advice is simple. Forget retiring to an easy chair, with the remote. That’s crazy. Work hard at the rest of your life, but do it your own way. Get in good shape. Then go out and take some chances. Get to know new people. Work hard at relationships, and get involved in your community or some projects. This may not all be fun or rewarding at first. You will take wrong turns and hit some potholes. But you will also have great adventures.
– Henry S. Lodge, Younger Next Year
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If you got by without a work identity for the first eighteen or twenty years of your life, you can certainly get by without one for another twenty years – or for however long you live after you retire. Thinking that you need a career identity to be a whole person is to deny yourself happiness and peace of mind.
– Ernie J. Zelinski, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
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In China, when I asked people to describe the first words or phrases that came to mind to describe an old person, the most common response was ‘wisdom’, whereas in the US, the first image to come to mind is usually ‘memory loss.’ . . . Too often, we don’t realize that our age beliefs are the product of cultural biases, rather than scientific facts.
– Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code
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In 2008 I heard geriatrician Joanne Lynn describe herself as an old person in training, and I’ve been one ever since. . . . Becoming an Old Person in Training makes it easier to think critically about what age means in this society, and the forces at work behind depictions of older people as useless and pathetic. Shame can damage self-esteem and quality of life as much as externally imposed stereotyping. Becoming an Old person in Training is a political act, because it derails this shame and self-loathing. It undoes the ‘otherness’ that powers ageism. . . . It robs the caricatures of crone or geezer of their power and frees us to become our full – our ageful – selves.
– Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks
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When each of us gets curious about what it takes to shift our perspective on aging, and when we envision our future years as a time of coming evolution instead of impending decline, we becomes like candles. The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi said it beautifully: ‘The candles are many, but the light is one.’
Each of us lights the way to move into the next stages of our individual lives. And when there’s a critical mass of us, we can shift the discourse on what it means to get older. We can collectively illuminate the value that age brings to ourselves, our communities and our world.
– Karen Walrond, Radiant Rebellion
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The secrets for living a full, rewarding, fulfilled, and enlightened life are not really secrets. These principles have been passed down through the ages, but the majority of humans tend to discount them and follow principles that don’t work. ‘In the end these things matter most,’ revealed Buddha. ‘How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you learn to let go?’
– Ernie J. Zelinski, 65 Things to do When Your Retire
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