Opportunities that Come with Age

Retirement and aging are doorways to abundant opportunities.

Retirement is more than an escape from professional duties. It also opens space to draw a new life map, discovering roads not yet traveled and adventures not yet enjoyed. In retirement we get to choose activities and relationships to replace those our employment mandated.

To explore these assertions, and the themes of abundant aging, meaning and purpose, I’ll use my automobile as an analogy. Strange, I know, but read on!

For the first three years of its life, the car and I averaged 30,000 miles each year. When I retired, for the third time, at age 84, the car was three years old. It took the following six years to add another 30,000 miles. In those six years I could choose where and when to travel.

In those six years both the car and me incurred numerous costs and relished many joys (at least I did!). In a more relaxed pace, we’ve visited places and people we could not afford the time to visit earlier. For sure, we’ve had our mechanical and system challenges, but we still go. A bit slower, but always cheerfully.

Ample Opportunities

Opportunities that come with aging are plentiful. Now I read what I want to read, rather than what I must study in order to do my job. I select the activities at church and in the community that I want to invest in rather than tend to them because I must.

In retirement, I’ve been able to participate in the development of Just Peace and Open and Affirming covenants in the church of my membership. I moderated several forums for discussions of disability justice. There was time to serve on an anti-racism task force for the Conference.

Of course, many fully employed persons also served on those committees, but in retirement I had the time to help with deeper research and initiate listening sessions with those who have already traveled those roads as well as with persons who were dubious or unclear why we needed to explore such matters.

Before retirement, the duties attached to pastoring large membership congregations with multiple staff members, and later serving as a troubleshooting interim in three different UCC conferences, meant there was neither time, opportunity, nor energy to concentrate on issues and concerns I would have preferred to pursue.

More Time for Relationships

Relationships with family members now seem more collegial because there is time to enjoy one another, uninterrupted by frantic calls to duty. In addition to phoning, writing or zooming, in retirement, I can travel to another state to visit the family’s remaining matriarch whom I had not seen for several years.

Certainly, there was a yearning, as retirement neared, to take a long, long “sabbatical.”

At first it seemed like heaven on earth to vegetate, sleep in, ignore the calendar, and just piddle around the apartment.

More Meaningful Pursuits

In last week’s blog Beth Long-Higgins introduced a word I never heard before but whose meaning I felt working on me. She shared the word “ikigai” (ee-key-guy). She explained it literally means “having a reason to get out of bed in the morning.” Ah, thank you, Beth! Ikigai provided the motivation to use my retirement for more meaningful and purposeful pursuits.

To illustrate, I want to return to my automobile analogy. First, though, know that I am sensitive to those readers whose aging circumstances may interfere with auto ownership or utilization. Certainly there are times as we age, when an abundance of caution related to physical limitations, medical issues, and other unfortunate experiences must take center stage.

There are tolls to pay for the mileage we put on our cars, and on ourselves. Repairs and parts replacements are costly. We may have issues with shoulders, knees, or something internal; or turbochargers, struts and distributors.

Fixing them does not always bring us back to previous performance levels. Yet our being able to fine tune our abilities and choices is one of many gifts available to us as we age.

Aging introduces issues, to be sure. But they do not have to dictate withdrawal from meaningful and purposeful activities.

Comparing my aging to the aging of my car, I note there have been hefty repair costs for both of us. They were necessary in order to “draw the new life map” I mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article. Again quoting Beth Long-Higgins, it is about finding “new ways to connect” and new perspective.

Here’s a fair warning: I enjoy wordsmithing, so an outrageous play on words is coming up!

Earlier in these comments I alluded to costly repairs for both me and my aging automobile. The final investment I made instead of retiring the car, was a purchase of a new set of tires.

Instead of retiring the car, I re-tired it!

Lyrics of the song “A Whole New World”, in Disney’s Aladdin, point to what’s ahead when we take on new adventures:

“A whole new world
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no
Or where to go ….
“A whole new world
A hundred thousand things to see

A whole new world
With new horizons to pursue…”

So in retirement, believe in “ikigai” (reasons for getting out of bed) and re -TIRE! Or if car upkeep is your thing, teach younger folk about car upkeep and how to change a tire.

Shalom!

To learn more about options post-retirement success and how to begin preparing even prior to finishing your primary career, join us in person or online for the 2024 Abundant Aging Symposium, Purpose, Meaning and Redefining Retirement on October 4^th. Discounts on registration before September 9^th.

For Reflection (either individually or with a group)

Read the blog. Read it a second time, maybe reading it aloud or asking someone else to read it aloud so you can hear it with different intonation and emphases. Invite the Divine to open your heart to allow the light of new understanding to pierce the shadows of embedded assumptions, stereotypes, and ways of thinking so that you may live more abundantly. Then spend some time with the following questions together with anything or anyone who helps you reflect more deeply.

• Aging is not all gloom and doom. What opportunity do you look forward to as you age?
• If you’re not yet retired, when you have completed your primary career, what will you choose to do more? Why?
• What new world are you looking forward to opening up as you age?

Download a pdf including the Reflection Questions to share and discuss with friends, family, or members of your faith community small group.