Letter to Self

It has been slightly over ten years since I gave up a regular paycheck.  After a number of years of consulting, I gradually wound it down and settled into what I guess you would call semi-retirement, basically I recreated myself. It has proven to be a very fruitful time in my life, devoted to meaningful work of my choosing. My work now consists of genealogy consulting, writing, artwork and public speaking, but I do it on my schedule and on my terms. Awhile back in this blog,  I wrote a letter to my 22 year old self, telling the then me what I would later learn in life. Then I was on the threshold of my work life. It occurs to me that there are many times in our life where we could benefit from a word from our future self. So with that in mind, I offer a letter to my 52 year old self, the age I was when I was considering taking the plunge of leaving my job. It was a decision accompanied by some trepidation.  



Dear Self,
Life is good from where I sit.  To get there you are going to have to learn to let go, be open to the unknown and let life unfold, all things at which you are not very good. Don't worry, you'll learn and the rewards are great. You've done a good job of preparing for your future.  The hard thing is knowing when to say "It's time," to let go of titles and paychecks and start to reinvent yourself.  It takes a while to let go of the idea of a paycheck, even when it is more psychological than necessary. If you can't go cold turkey, either because you need the income or merely think you do, do some consulting or part-time work. You'll know when you are ready to let go. When you get a call on a project, ask them to describe it. If it interests you, you will know. You will start wrapping your brain around it, considering how you would tackle it. You will feel a zing. When there is no zing, it will be time to move on.  


But what about income you ask? You forget, I know you, you are a bit of a worrier, a belt and suspenders type. The savings you socked away and a lifetime of living within your means will pay off. By the time the zing is gone you will have learned to trust the time value of money. It really does grow, that's not just theory you know, even if market shocks cause it to drop precipitously now and then.  Just a heads up, it will tank right after you leave your job.  Yep, you'll be examining your portfolio every time the market dips that first year. Relax, everything will be fine. Just stay diversified and live modestly. 



Now you can begin to fully take control of your life and your time. When you are still consulting, you are always attuned to work emails and not fully attuned to yourself. When you leave that behind,you will start by settling into your natural rhythms. You've always been a night owl by nature so pretty soon you'll be pushing lights out to 2 AM, reading well into the wee hours of morning, just because you can.



As a result you will ban morning meetings before 10 AM, yet another reason to reject consulting jobs where they want you in the office in the morning.  If you're invited to serve on a board that meets over breakfast you will coyly tell them that it won't work for you as it sounds slightly impolite to say "I don't do morning meetings" to someone who doesn't have the luxury of that choice.



When the world turns topsy-turvy, you will get involved politically, stating your opinions freely on social media and in your blog. Oh almost forgot, you will join Facebook in 2008 and begin a blog in 2009. I'll explain later what those are, suffice it to say that you are more public than you ever imagined.  Anyway, it will dawn on you one day that you would have felt a bit uneasy being so open about what you thought when you were receiving a paycheck. When you had a work persona you were more careful about expressing political views, even though they tended to leak out around the edges. You were never very good at hiding what you thought. Now you will find that it feels freeing to be open about who you are and what you believe.


You will rediscover a sense of possibility. You remember when you were first starting in your career, how you always felt such a sense of anything can happen, as if opportunities lurked just around the corner. The world felt like a magical place and you discovered your ability to create something from nothing. It was exhilarating. Along the way, that got tamped down. That sense of adventure began to wane as you were called on to perform specific functions. Creativity wasn't the priority and you discovered that a well-paying job, while it has its rewards, doesn't encourage you to use all your talents. You began to wonder if that early creativity was still there. Happily you will discover it is. Your sense of possibility will be reawakened and you will feel re-energized.


Sometimes you will hear of different careers that sound interesting. You will think for a moment "I could go into that!" Then you'll remember that you've already done the career thing and typical careers eliminate flexibility in your life. That of course doesn't mean you can't dive into something new. You can be a writer or an artist or a genealogy consultant or a public speaker or any number of flexible roles. In fact you'll begin all of those paths, sometimes amping up an existing activity, sometimes discovering a whole new direction. Often you will be surprised to discover new abilities you didn't know you had. You will feel freer to experiment with new things because you have nothing to lose, no perch in a corporate hierarchy to preserve. 



You've always done a lot of volunteer work. Now you choose your commitments carefully, engaging in things that have meaning to you and where you can use the skills you enjoy using. If things don't meet that test, you bow out or take a pass. One day you look at your involvements and realize they accurately reflect your interests and values.



You will be surprised to discover many avenues to creating new friends, every interest has a community that accompanies it.  You will be out in many different circles and accumulate new friends easily, friends who share your interests, not just your career path. Writing and speaking publicly introduces you to people you might never have met otherwise.


Now the bad news, that study or closet that you've always figured you'd clean up when you had time. Not going to happen. Stop pretending. Just because you have more flexible time, doesn't mean you will commit it to things you don't like doing. Oh you might do a bit around the edges, enough to hold the chaos at bay, but when you've successfully built your new life, you will much rather spend your time exploring it.

And yes, you are getting older. On a good day, one might say you look good for your age, always that damn qualifier.   All in all though, this is a pretty good time in your life, a growing time. You can almost hear the synapses snapping.


Love, 
Your Future Self

Where It Leads

Retirement!  That is the topic of conversation that typically comes up with my still-employed friends.  That in turn segues into what they imagine they'll do when they reach that stage.  Most have no idea.  They often turn to me and say they wish they were creative like me as if that would quickly solve the dilemma.

I've been at this now for nine years, the same length as my longest salaried position. While pleased with the path I've pursued, I have no more certainty as to what comes next than I did when I embarked upon this journey. I do have tasks that occupy my time... two blogs, six websites, speaking gigs, exhibitions and of course the artwork and writing that fuels those activities. Throw in my reading goals and my workout schedule and I sometimes contemplate taking a sabbatical from my "retirement".

Oddly enough this question of what to do in retirement is not too different from the question our grandson faces on what to pursue in college. This year my husband and I have taken him on several college visits. There is so much pressure on college-age kids to map out their career path right from the beginning. I found myself telling him that you aim in a general direction of interest and fine-tune it along the way. Kind of like a recipe, a little bit more of this, a little bit less of that and maybe some of this for flavoring. That is how most of us find our career and we often change it along the way. Sometimes it's a job we might never have imagined because we didn't know it existed or we had to create it.

I don't think my post-retirement process has been much different than it was when I was 17 and trying to find my way. When I left my career, I aimed in a general direction of things that interested me, artwork and family history. I had discoveries along the way about what the ingredients needed to be, storytelling, public speaking, writing. And just as I returned to school at 28 for a masters in a totally different discipline, I reserve the right to change directions at any time.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to solve the dilemma, to fix the direction. In reality the point is to embrace the dilemma. Work and play, whether pre or post retirement, are about finding our way in a continual exploration of life. And if you choose a creative direction you are really choosing uncertainty, that's the point of creativity. You get to create whatever it will be. And that means at some point even you don't know what it will be. 

And yes, sometimes it feels burdensome, not knowing what form it will take and if you'll ultimately be successful in whatever way you define success. And sometimes you get stuck and then you have to get unstuck.  I've been at that point for awhile. I want to start a new series of artwork that I develop in a different way and I am working on a book, a new and foreign area for me. As I'm faced with things I really don't know how to do, it occurs to me that it is best to do it when I have nothing to lose. There are two points in our life where we have little to lose, when we're starting out and when we've left the workforce. Those are the points we can be at our most creative.  It is no accident that what I am doing now often reminds me of my first job. Both were filled with a sense of feeling my way, taking on new things I had never encountered and the excitement and joy that comes with discovery.

So to those starting out in college or early in their career or those leaving their salaried work life, my suggestion is chill. Feel your way. Don't worry about an endpoint, we ultimately all have the same one. Let your life evolve around the things that intrigue you, the things you're curious about. Then follow your curiosity where it leads.