Part Three: Retirement Routines
A brief disclaimer: This is the final entry in the 3 part series of Rites, Rituals, and Routines of Retirement. Just like no two lives are lived the same way, your retirement plans and trajectory, current or future, may not parallel my own. In this post, I am offering some examples of my retirement routines based on my own experience – free to take or leave. I hope the routines you create bring you satisfaction and an abundance of joy in The Precious Days.
For so many years, I woke up each morning in a rush. Barely 5:00 a.m. and I already felt I was behind. So many of my workdays started with a mix of excitement and stress. I loved what I did, so there was a lot to look forward to at work. But stress often won out, and most of the time it would rule not only the hectic starts to the day, but even my time once I got home from work. I usually did manage to eat some kind of breakfast and pack a lunch that usually just went on a tupperware vacation each day, from my fridge to the fridge at work, or sometimes just along for the ride in the backseat of my car. Work was often too busy or poorly timed for lunch. Ravenous and exhausted by the time I got home, I’d make poor eating choices, unwind with TV and with my laptop on the couch, working and mindlessly eating until it was time to go to bed and get up and do it all over again. There were so many times my husband would ask at 8:00 p.m.,“Why do you still have your coat on?” If you know, you know.
Oh, how I looked forward to the point in my life when I would have more time to do the things I loved. Enter retirement, the era of new routines.
There is nothing magical about trading in one set of routines for another. Of course, I wanted magic. Finding that sense of wonder, of something revealed to me in the routines of The Precious Days would actually take some work and another change in mindset. Time doesn’t change in retirement. I didn’t get “more time.” There are still 24 hours in a day. It’s how I use the time that changed for me. More importantly, it was how I thought about time that changed things for me. In the process of reinventing my routines for retirement, I no longer thought in terms of “wasting time” or feeling guilty because I didn’t complete a task. I had obsessed so much about that in my work years. Did the 7 day week change? No. But the consequences imposed by a 5 day work week with a 2 day weekend used to play catch up dissolved away. Ahhh…finally. In retirement, I was able to decide how I wanted to “spend” the time of The Precious Days, and I felt time had become the richest commodity in my life. I wanted to spend this investment of minutes, hours, and days in ways that could bring me satisfaction, peace, and joy.
There were two tools that helped me in the process of establishing the routines in retirement to help me achieve the goals of satisfaction, happiness, accomplishment, and purpose: unlearning and structure.
1. UNLEARNING
Unlearning the routines of decades of work as a professional in education, not to mention the years as a student going to school for half a year, is no small feat. The rhythm of everything for me was tied to the field of education. Celebration of a New Year? Why that’s the first day of school, of course. Time to exhale? Um, that would be June. Every month held some educational touchstone, related emotions, and often obstacles to enjoying what the months truly had to offer. Unlearning the routines that accompanied these rhythms meant dismantling a worldview, and not to sound too dramatic, but a deconstruction of my self. My professional self.
One of the most critical areas of unlearning was related to my own headspace. I noticed that during my transition year, I was still approaching my days with a work mindset, even though my new role was very part time. Annie, who is the wonderful writer and storyteller behind the blog Annie’s Journey said it so well commenting on my blog The Rites of Retirement: “What I'm only realizing now, almost a year after leaving my job, is that … my head was still "in the game." My (former) employer's game, not mine…. I was thinking about …work…not…my life work.” As we both learned, once you’re ready in your transition to retirement, you need to “make peace and move on.”
My ritual of Morning Pages really helped me with this “exorcism.” I found I would “think forward” about the day and focus on exciting possibilities and what I wanted to accomplish, which sometimes was more of a feeling (like satisfaction) than a task. I had to “unlearn” the routines of the workday, which I saw as limiting (early meetings, late meetings, a project that would consume evenings, and god forbid that outfit I needed was in the laundry or at the dry cleaners). So my new routines took on the meaning I wanted them to. They were no longer routines in service to a work day. They were life routines: life giving, life affirming, life enhancing. By unlearning my old work-related routines, I was open to creating retirement routines that served the purpose of The Precious Days.
“When I wake up now, I breathe deeply and look around in wonder. I can do or not do. I can meditate or exercise, check email or practice ukulele…. Who am I, if I am not the Doer? It’s an age-old spiritual question and a perfect practice for me now.”
2. STRUCTURE
This may seem a bit counter intuitive. Why would I need structure? Go with the flow! Do whatever I want! Oh, I admit there were days when I said “my retirement, my rules” and just ambled through my day. But that wasn’t very satisfying for me. You can only stay in your pajamas watching Mike and Molly reruns for so long, even if you don’t feel particularly guilty about it. But I am a self-confessed structure lover. So it was critical for me in unlearning my old routines that I replaced them with routines that would provide a pleasant, unhurried, “non-task-specific” structure to the day. My daily retirement routines are the backdrop for my retirement rituals. Most routines set up or flow into those deeper rituals. Adopting a morning, afternoon, and evening framework was the right structure for my routines. Early in my retirement, my husband and I agreed to keep the weekends a bit non-routine. I still wanted those two days to feel special since I was finally able to enjoy weekend activities, like a Farmer’s Market or a night out for live music.
Here is a sampling of my current Retirement Routines (without the obvious ones added), which don’t always follow an “order” — they are routines rather than a schedule:
Morning:
Morning Rituals
Make the bed
Take the dog out for a morning walk
Wordle, Spelling Bee, and The Mini (thank you NYT)
“Good morning” texts to friends
An episode of The Archers on BBC Radio 4 or The CBS Radio Mystery Theater on Brando Oldtime Radio
Watch any new videos in my subscriptions on Youtube and/or update Goodreads
Have a high protein late breakfast (I pay way more attention to protein now at this stage of my life)
Read a chapter or two of my current novel
Morning walking at the Complex (I have just started this)
Clean up chores
Afternoon:
Write
Read a chapter or two of my current novel
Run errands, if I have them
Water the plants, sit in the garden
A walk if I haven’t gone in the morning
Take the dog out for her pre-dinner walk
Eat an early dinner
Evening:
Clean up chores, maybe laundry
Relaxing on the deck in the warmer months
An hour or so on the the treadmill, watching a show on Britbox or Acorn TV and/or watching sports with my husband
Taking the dog out for her evening walk (my husband takes her out at various times, too)
A few hours of reading my current novel with a cup of herbal tea
Evening Rituals
Now that the weather is nicer, my husband and I have started to take more day trips and various outings, which I will share in another blogpost next month.
These routines are working for me now, but I am sure they will be modified and adjusted as I make my way. Some may become the seed of a new ritual. And there are still some days that feel a bit like the “bad old days” of my work life, but they are few and far between and much more easily put into perspective. I used to feel like the days of my work life just slipped away. But now, The Precious Days feel more like they unfold.
What are some of the things you’ve had to unlearn? What new routines have you created to serve the life you want to live each day. I would love for you to share in the Comments below. And speaking of the Comments, thank you to all of you who take the time to share. It feels like community when that happens. It may take me a while, but I promise to respond to each comment.
