In my ten years as a card-bearing senior, I had on occasions, asked several retirees how it felt during their very first day of pasture. Consistently, each individual reply points to what the title of the article suggests. After all, one has to understand it’s no joke when someone starts working almost immediately after graduating from college, struggles at that first go, moves on to build a family, and then eventually finds oneself suddenly attending golden jubilee celebrations with former classmates. The very same bunch of wisecracks who now, like yourself, appear weather-beaten and looking like they’ve just gone out of a burning building. Tough.
A friend once told me, there exists a deep-grey haze that separates the boundless and youthful energy of your first job from one’s first day of retirement. That fuzzy in-between, though often captured in pics, videos and select memories, will feel as though they have never taken place once you have retired. Most often, during one’s first days of not working, you’ll be asking yourself the first of two significant life questions, what the hell happened?
More than we know, the daily schedule of a nine-to-five, repeated over a forty-year period (give or take), significantly does something to the psyche of any person. In a sense, when routine is suddenly taken away, it’s akin to finding oneself in uncharted territory all of a sudden and you have to stop by the roadside to ask the second, and more important life question, where to now?
Many whom I know have acted as though they’ve already everything planned. And their template reads: retire to a farm that’s the fruit of your blood, sweat and tears, grow chickens and then live the rest of your life in peace. Not necessarily in that order. Well and good for some, they have succeeded, but for others, life may have had other plans. The reality is, not everything goes one’s way and your projected peaceful farm existence may turn out to be played in a different pasture environment altogether; such as a retirement home, a dilapidated one roomer or worse, a hospital bed. There is just simply no luck at all in predicting what life throws at you. That’s just the way it is.
So, even as it’s senseless to say back to square one, I mean to suggest we might just instead humbly start where we left off. Deep-grey haze, fuzzy in-between or not, let’s all reboot with this carefree thought, “It is what it is”. After all, what we really have from hereon is a shorter journey.
Welcome whatever comes, take to heart whatever good we’ve learned along the way and then strive to live out a pleasant life. Finally, as a noble add-on, help others to do the same. Muhammad Ali has been credited to have said: helping others is the rent you pay for the room that you have here on earth. Alas, one suggestion my late mother once said to me comes back and it’s never too late for all to do. Be kind.
Finally, even though that might be a lot to think about when you again get that Saturday feeling, at least, you’d have already answered the two questions. Pass your papers, finished or unfinished.
