Retirement

This is the time we remember aching for. A time to relax, escape calendar time wars, to cease the constant movement from home to office and back, as well as to and from the offices of others. Then there is the movement to and from client offices, conferences and so many other trips.  Constant time pressures, all of them a conflict with family commitments and care.

And then there is the desire to do things we don’t have time for, like fishing, boating, camping and other family explorations. What about travel to far-off places? That, too. And hobbies as well. Books, too, those we wanted to read but had no time for.

I remember all of that well. A life lived half in one world and half in another. So, retirement was the end-all and be-all we hoped for.

Now that I’m here, were the aches realistic?  Well, no, they weren’t.

I ended my career owning my own business. It was consulting, and I made a good income from time spent with clients. But the adage is true: when working, the income is good but no time for fun. When idle or on vacation, the fun is great, but no income is earned. This reality restricted time off from work. Plain and simple.

There are other bonuses found in retirement. One in particular is a growing recognition that experience and variety of clients teach us many lessons. We observe things we often didn’t while working. We came to value life and its smallest details more. The little things mean a lot and provide a platform to live and learn so much more.

I volunteered for SCORE for eleven years. Mentoring and consulting small businesses and startups (mostly in nonprofits in my case) demonstrated to me the value of those smaller points of life. Richer and more meaningful, often I found my SCORE mentoring more valuable than what I provided as a paid consultant.

Life is process. There is no other beginning or end other than birth and life. The rest is all process, learning, doing, failing, and learning valuable lessons. We grieve more in elder years, but each passing is a fresh lesson of value and appreciation for what has gone before. Memories are refreshed and clearly better understood and valued. Health is relative and not to be feared. It is what it is, a challenge and portent of an eventual end of this life. It is not an unexpected end, just the timing of it.

I often wondered how a group of grieving adults could find so much to laugh about. But now I know. We have lived with loss and learned the value of it. That is an unexpected positive. Think about that. We had something we learned its value of once lost. But we had the experience and the memory of it in the first place. A gift to treasure from that moment on.

October 22, 2025

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