Retirement and What I Learned the First Year

I'm pretty organized and I thought I was prepared. You can plan for the obvious stuff that you've read about. But I don't think you can fully prepare for all the emotional changes and the issues that come up in that first year of retirement. The issues that you planned for will come up, but trust me, something unexpected will also pop up. In addition, since life is true to form, you can be sure that something out of your control will probably affect you after you retire.

I prepared for not knowing quite what to do with myself. After thirty some years of working, I knew that I would need to fill time. I had hobbies that I had never had time to work on, so I set myself some goals to try things I had always wanted to do. Since I was moving to my retirement home I expected to spend a lot of time familiarizing myself with my property and the surrounding country; the National Forest, the ocean beaches, forty some miles of river. Even though I had read that depression was fairly common for new retirees, I hadn't expected it to happen to me. I thought that since I was fulfilling many years of dreams by moving to this place, that I would remain entranced with it. Depression did happen to me. I spent a fair amount of time lost: aimless and uncomfortable. It took work to drag myself back and start over on my new life.

Although intellectually I knew that I would lose touch with all my best friends who were work friends, and still working, I didn't really believe it would happen to me. It did. They didn't call or write; they didn't make the trip to visit. I hadn't understood that I was fundamentally leaving their world. I was in a completely different world and as time went on I began to lose interest in my old life and work. Still, I spent weeks and months mourning the loss of good friends that I interacted with daily, and who now were drifting away. In a sense I mourned over the fact that work really wasn't important anymore. My career and the one place I worked for thirty some years no longer had a bearing on my day to day life. I was left with a void that it took me most of the year to start filling.

I didn't expect to have to rebuild all my routines. I read that I would have to, but again, I didn't really believe it. I can tell you that I embarrassed myself more than once, with someone at the door at 1:00PM, and me still in my pajamas. I can tell you that when my grown daughter was visiting and found my morning to do list, I was embarrassed. The sad fact of the matter was that for awhile I had to make a list to remember to brush my teeth and wash my face and take my meds and test my blood sugar. All the old routines I had were based on my work schedule. If I didn't go to work, when would I do those things that I used to do to get ready for work? Like getting dressed, having breakfast, taking my shower. I just didn't expect to be so lost without those comforting routines. I hadn't believed I would have to build new routines, but that's what you do when you make a drastic change in your life.

I've also learned that the advice about not making multiple changes at once is actually good advice. I retired, put my primary residence on the market, moved to my second home two and a half hours away. I moved from a very urban setting, the city I had lived and worked in for my entire adult life, to a house and outbuildings on a few acres on a river. The setting is very rural and quiet with few neighbors. The nearest supermarket and banking is across a pass and about thirty miles away. When my house in the city didn't sell because of the economy, I became an absentee landlord, which really wasn't in the plans. As I said, there is always something out of your control that will affect your plans.

I learned that working hard in an office job does not prepare you very well for many of the tasks involved in maintaining three acres of lawn, orchard and garden. Add in using wood as your primary heat source and I soon discovered that there was a lot of physical labor involved in this new lifestyle. I learned pretty quickly that my physical condition was worse than I thought I was. Moving, splitting and stacking firewood is hard work. In the last year I have stacked and moved about six cords of wood. Last fall, I had no stamina. I worked about five minutes and rested for thirty. I have improved my strength and endurance considerably. Now I can usually work for thirty minutes and get started again after a five minute rest. I have mowed, pruned, hauled, burned and put in too many hours with the weed eater. I can say my yard is now my full time job.

Do I regret making all those changes at once? Not really. I wanted and needed to make a complete break from my employed life, and I had always promised myself that as soon as I quit working I would move out of the city. I traded sirens, neighbors, mass transit and crowds for a little slice of riverbank, the sound of the river hurtling on by and more deer in the area than people.

And have I changed in the last year? The first winter here I was a solitary person. I stayed home and worked through some of these changes that I had to make. I relished not having contact with dozens of co-workers and all the contact you get just living in a city. I think that was what I needed to do to make that real break from the person I was when I was working. I know that I took human contact for granted and got a lot of good stuff out of it, even though I complained at the time. I realize now that I need regular contact with people. The nearest community, though small, has a number of clubs and activities. I'm beginning to make new friends. I am looking at opportunities for myself. The challenge will be finding that balance between volunteering for the good of the community and not getting overwhelmed or too involved. I've learned that I need to contribute to the community, but I don't need to be a leader or the decision maker.

I traded fast food and fancy restaurants for my own cooking, and found out that I actually liked to cook and was pretty good at it. I tried to get a sense of the timetable of harvesting the trees in my orchard. I've grown to love gathering berries right out of the garden (or blackberries along the private road), and apples and plums and pears from the orchard. I've discovered that when you have apples you have lots of apples and now I'm learning about food preservation techniques. There are even crawdads, trout and salmon from the river, almost all right in my own yard.

The pace is so much slower here. When the guy I buy firewood from comes by to see if I'm ready for more, we sit and chat for half an hour. I go to an exercise group almost as much for the company as the exercise. We often sit and talk for twenty minutes afterwards. No one is in a big hurry to get to the next thing.

The main thing I battled this first year was my need to accomplish everything that needed to be done. In my work life, I always needed to complete things and be able to look back and know what I had accomplished. Because I am one person, and not as strong as I need to be, I obsessed over all the things the property needed, and that I didn't have the energy to do. I had extensive plans to prune all the fruit trees. I got them pruned enough the first year that you could run the riding lawnmower under them without injury. I intended to remove garden fencing and convert the huge space back to mostly lawn. I did remove and reuse the wire fencing, but I can't mow the area yet. I planned to build four raised beds in a sunnier, better location for summer vegetables. I did get two built, but almost too late for the summer veggies.

Now I have a five year plan. I have come to realize that I cannot do it all in one year, or even three. The fruit trees will get pruned, but it will take three to five years to get them all where they should be. They will survive. The huge garden space in the shade of the orchard will be returned to lawn, but it may not be for a couple years. My raised beds will increase as my energy does and I'm sure I can take care of more. I've learned that there is time, and now I'm interested in my surroundings and checking out all the other opportunities in the surrounding area.

What I have achieved in my retirement is contentment. It has been hard won but true contentment. There were emotional hazards to work through, and probably more to come. But now I know that I will continue to learn and grow, and even if my dream isn't exactly as I dreamed it, I'm happy with the reality. I'm stronger and healthier and ready for the next twenty years.

My advice to someone who is soon to retire is to do the research and know what to expect emotionally. Everyone is different, so different things will trip you up. Be prepared for that and keep your support group as strong and available as you can. Finally, be flexible, and be nice and forgiving to yourself. I was disappointed in all the baggage I ended up having to work through, but the reward is the contentment and enjoyment I now feel.