Today, a Friday, I finished work and it was a little bit of a special event. If plans hold, today I finished working a full-time job for… well, for the rest of my life, I guess. But I’m not retiring. Next week I’m on PTO. When I return the following Monday, I’ll be on a part-time schedule.
I’ll be doing the same as for the last year: larger-scale change management and improving our practices and culture. I often research and refine best practices so we can get and recognize the best from our associates and managers.
I’ve had the opportunity to retire for some time now. That’s the result of a lot of careful saving and diligent effort for many years. So it’s not lucky but I feel fortunate, if that makes sense, that I could retire if I wanted. However, I have two strong feelings in conflict with doing so, and neither is the same as proverbial cold feet. Rather, they come from a lot of introspection (and a nonzero amount of useful therapy).
First, I believe I still have more to offer at work and that my effort can benefit others. Second, I have a strong intuition that a full early retirement would be too rapid a decompression. (Other retirees probably know what I mean. I’ve lived with stress for so long, that it’s too much absence too soon. My plans and spirit need to catch up.)
I do look forward to an expanded amount of free time, and have plans to fill some of it. The lion’s share is creative pursuits — making music, on my own and with others; expanding my cooking skills; and, hopefully, doing some light home improvements, or rather, learning the hard way how to do them since I don’t consider myself innately handy. It’s important to know more of this stuff on a fixed income, right?
A few music projects I’m excited about are starting to emerge. I’m also having to re-learn a lesson I forget periodically, which is that not every project that comes your way is worth jumping at. But I’ll get all this balanced in time. Next week part of my plan is to write down some goals that will help me frame the second half of the year’s worth of personal time.
Some people say end of an era, but I think this is a smaller change within my “era” of work. It’s more like a “period” in geologic terms. Either of which, of course, are ridiculous terms to use, given how small a speck my lifetime makes on that scale.
That being said, it’s not wrong to commemorate the occasion. I felt like writing something about it both for my own later reference (and maybe amusement), and also because I just finished a great novel called The Correspondent which is itself epistolary fiction. I guess it inspired me to write, which I don’t generally do enough outside the business domain.
So… wish me luck I guess? Let’s go!
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.