Retirement can bring different emotional responses which we need to attend to and negotiate. It also leaves us with a lot of free time. Tess Martin helps us to plan to make the most of the opportunities it offers.
To be human means to be able to change. One of the biggest life changes you will experience after joining the workforce is leaving it. Such a step may seem daunting, but remember that you’ve already mastered huge social changes.
Think of the changes you’ve experienced in your lifetime. For example, fifty years ago, your home probably didn’t have a telephone. Today, you may be computerised and linked to the Internet. Such is the pace of technological evolution.
As an older person, you’ve had to find your place within many social, cultural, philosophical and consumer changes in Irish society, and you’ve coped with personal life chapters typically involving success, failure, loss, longing and fulfillment.
World of work
Retirement is another chapter with its own challenges and potential. To help you to manage this new time, it could be useful to identify what work has offered, so that some facets can be replaced.
On a positive front, work gives status, identity, income, skills, possibly achievement and the comfort of habit. Work can also mean hassle, the stress of commuting, bullying, fatigue, rush, fuss, disappointment, worry and boredom. In reviewing the pluses and minuses, it’s good to be honest and not to fool yourself.
So what will change when you leave work? Almost everything, including your daily base, routine and relationships. Such change will inevitably involve an emotional adjustment, and you may need to negotiate the following stages.
Stages to negotiate
*Shock. While the impact of retirement may be pleasant or otherwise, the sudden change usually packs a punch, leaving you feeling somewhat dazed and unreal.
*Euphoria. This can arise from the relief at leaving work forever, or from an unwillingness to accept this fact. You can have that holiday feeling, believing that soon things will be ‘back to normal’.
*Denial. You may feel things are moving too quickly and want to deny the reality that you are retired.
*Self-doubt. You may feel in a vacuum. Life no longer has its familiar structure. You may question your identity, even your self-worth, and long for things to be as they were.
*Testing. You begin to experiment with your new life. Often unconsciously, you test out new roles, behaviours, ideas, schedules, even the way you dress. This can be a time of trial and error: you take up something, find it doesn’t satisfy, and move on to something else. You may be also testing relationships with spouse, family and friends. How will you spend time with them now that your time-scale has so altered?
*Acceptance. One day you wake up and realize you have arrived in a new psychological country. You no longer hark back. You now live in the present, with fresh challenges and possibilities offered with each new day. You accept that you are retired. Your life has incorporated a philosophy based on a realistic assessment of past, present and future.
Making the adjustment
There is no standard time-scale to complete the above steps. They can take weeks or months, but normally do not take more than a year. They are a general guideline only, since change affects different people in different ways. You may not experience all of the above stages, but you will probably experience some of them.
Journeying through change is usually difficult. How can you help yourself? Knowing in advance that some adjustment is necessary can help. For example, a freer discipline is an obvious change in retirement and, while freedom is positive, it can be tyrannical too. You may relish the fact that you can now take an hour over the crossword, instead of the traditional ten minutes at coffee break. Or you may feel cast out, not belonging, uneasy, purposeless.
It’s important also to know what kind of person you are, because your successful retirement will be unique to you. Become familiar with your wishes, circumstances, commitments, income and lifestyle. Do you, for example, like structure? If so, you may need to impose your own routine in retirement: ‘Wednesday is library day’; ‘I’ll go to 10 o’clock Mass on weekdays,’ and so on. On the other hand, if you’ve waited forty years to be rid of routine, you may relish the chance for spontaneity in your life.
Another useful exercise is to do a simple personal stocktaking. Some good questions to ask at this time of change are: Where am I in life? What have I achieved? What do I still wish to achieve? Are these goals feasible? If so, how do I approach them? How do they fit in with my commitments to family, friends and community?
Opportunity
Most of us need a purpose in life, and in retirement we may need to set our own goals. In this, retirement offers, above all, an opportunity to fulfill some earlier ambitions.
As younger people, we were faced with many doors, offering different experiences and opportunities. Unfortunately, we were unable go through all those doors then. The path we chose in youth meant the opening of some doors and the closing to others. This was largely due the career choices we made. They meant turning our backs on some possibilities in terms of our personal development.
Until now, that is. One of the joys of retirement is the chance to go back, to open some of those closed doors, and to explore what is beyond them.
For example, many retired people would have liked to study at third level. Now, perhaps you can. Many universities have openings for mature students, and the opportunities for adult learning in everything from art to word processing, from first aid to languages, are numerous.
You may love gardening, but have never had enough time for it. You may enjoy reading, or always fancied trying your hand at writing fiction. You may wish to get involved in your neighbourhood by offering your skills as a volunteer. You may wish to improve your golf. The possibilities are endless. Once you’ve adjusted to the change involved, life in retirement can be very rich.
This article first appeared in the Messenger (May 2006), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
