The R Word

Kind of a weird day on the career front. I went ahead and put together some things for the resume and sent off version 4 to my resume person for review and comment. Then I had my phone call with the career coach and talked about my epiphany about the gift of time. I think I actually used that phrase. Maybe that post was a warm up act for that conversation.

I actually confessed to having this here blog (without mentioning it specifically) and talked about wanting to spend time on that and other activities and not wanting to spend my days networking and looking for leads. She seemed quite excited about the whole thing although they may be trained to be excited simply when you make a decision about your future.

And yet I still hesitate to use that word to describe myself. Probably because of the circumstances the lead to where I am. Most people who retire get a fun little party where you get a bunch of people to eat cake, drink punch and tell you how jealous they are. I was told I was no longer needed. No party, no cake and no punch.

Why that would make a difference is beyond me. Maybe the word just has some finality associated with it and I’m one who really likes to keep my options open.

And maybe it is also because there is something self indulgent about wanting to spend your days doing things for you and having fun. That’s kind of silly but it is one of the things that rolls around in my head. I’m certainly still young enough to be working and that’s what I should be doing.

Don’t worry, I’m not really listening to these voices but they are present and creating some background noise. It is also what makes it harder to completely slam that door.

Still, as I was describing this to the career coach she said something about how it looks like I’ve found something to be excited about. And that’s important. That’s something within me telling me I’m making the right decision and that this is the right path for me.

This is probably sounds a little scrambled and disjointed. I guess I had no idea what this process was going to be like. Certainly one advantage to a planned retirement is that you’ve built up a certain mind set and worked towards a goal (the retirement date). This has just forced me to look at my options and ask ‘what do I really want to do’ and that has required a lot of thought and my mind is scrambled at times.

I think part of it is getting the question from people “what are you going to do”. There are a lot of people who can’t imagine life without work and can’t imagine how they would fill their time. I think from now on my answer will just be “I’m going to enjoy life” and leave it at that.

One little funny story about that meme above. I’ve actually had to put a reminder in my phone on Tuesday morning to tell me to take the trash down because I do sometimes have to think a bit to remember what day it actually is.