Pleasure or threat? Ending or beginning? How you view retirement and aging is a challenge. It takes a reboot of your way of viewing things and setting standards. Before, having an education, a career, a home, a family were the targets. What are targets now? Well, be ready to do an 180 and head back to the years when you were semi-adult and excited for the future and independence.
Accept - you are not what you used to be. That is not a downgrade, it's a burning the old labels you used for reference.
This blank slate you have become will allow for the real you - without the expectations or titles, values or goals you once held.
You did your job in personal and professional life. This is time for the REAL you.
It's an ideal time to scale down and be more mobile. Hand heirlooms over to kids and grandkids.
Be ready to live where you always wanted in a manageable scale so that you have freedoms.
Pick up old hobbies, interests, teenhool obsessions.
Listen to the music, watch the movies, look at the photo albums of your youth. These can reengage you in that energy. I know when I hear the song "Year of the Cat" I am in high school all over again.
Check that bucket list. Did you want to learn to surf? Did you always hope to sail on a sailboat? Did you want to see Hawaii? That's the new goal.
Reconnect with the values of your youth - grow a garden, smoke some cannabis, go to a concert for the old bands making the rounds at casinos, pick up trash along roadways, volunteer for humanitarian purposes. Be a 60s/70s era mentality.
You may be strapped for cash if you didn't prepare for this great void in career. Consider an etsy shop and make those macrame plant holders for the millenials who are having a massive trend of houseplant hoarding. How about considering a communal living. If you are divorced or widowed, you have rooms open. Be sure to rent them to others like you that you know well so there is comraderie. This allows for help going to doctor's appointments, a community garden in the yard, and not being lonely if kids don't visit.
Consider selling or donating the old work wardrobe and hit your denims or maxi dresses standards from the past. Go gray. Dare to go back to a hippie standard. It's very very chic for retirees to go aging baby boomer in a way that has more flair than any other aging population.
Create a lifestyle that has you walking or bicycling, eating home grown, using supplements. Just stay young and healthy and those from the 60s/70s era totally get the focus on health and holistic.
If there was a path you wanted in your youth that you didn't take out of fear or expectations, do it now. Learn a language, visit a foreign land, master cooking, play guitar, karaoke, take an adult cruise.
Consider contacting friends from your youth. Go back to the hometown. Revisit your past. It has a way of reminding you of that spiritual energy your soul is tied to. Without expectations and rules, as kids we knew exactly who we were.
All that life experience made us extremely wise. This is a knowledge you pass on to grandkids. Hey, grandma was a pot-smoking, concert-attending, rebel. But, life gave her more experiences, more corrections, more lessons, and the hardest times honed her into a diamond.
We don't have to age like people have assumed for thousands of years, as if we are a dried out prune of a self that was once productive and fresh. In fact, we blossomed, didn't wither.
Feed that teenager within.
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