Encore Performances

A month after I retired and moved to Colorado, I filled out a survey. At the end it asked my occupation. The last category just before other was retired. For the first time in all the hecticness of leaving my job and moving across the country, I was directly confronted with acknowledging I am retired.

I thought objectively about retirement and planned it for years. I worked with a trusted financial advisor who guided me in preparing to have enough money to retire. Her assessment was, “You will be fine, Karla, just don’t go crazy.” I was a leisure researcher and had written about aging and retirement. I loved being a professor, but I also did not want to be one of those people who “stayed too long.” I wanted to leave when I still felt productive. I had watched both of my parents retire and continue lives that were meaningful to them and their communities. I also had been thinking for almost 50 years about wanting to live in Colorado to be near the mountains that fed my soul and offered me a sense of place.

I never thought, however, about what it would feel like to be retired and to check a box that marked my new identity. Retirement was now an emotional reality and I had to confront my new actuality.

Somewhere along the path of pondering retirement, someone told me that the most successful retirement was about “going to” something new and not “going away” or escaping from life of the past. In living retirement as moving toward something, I embrace how my friend, Linda Erceg, described retirement as an encore performance.

Music, sports, volunteering, writing, and outdoor adventures are dear to me. Even though I worked diligently in my professional career, I was also passionate about my social and recreation activities. My life was heavily scheduled so I could get everything done.  

What I had never done, however, was sit still and just relax. I defined myself as a human doing. Retirement meant putting my energy in other ways besides working, which had been far more joyous than drudgery.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught me more about slowing down than I had learned about retirement up to that point. I started to appreciate the mental energy that I could decrease. When working, I seldom shut my brain off. I was continually thinking about what I needed to do the next day, how I could have done better in teaching, or what more I needed to do to finish a research article. In retirement, I can do something like volunteering and then go home and not think about it anymore. Retirement, and the forced slowdown from the pandemic, has helped me center on living in the moment rather than evaluating the past or always planning for the near future.

A professional colleague, Kathy O’Keefe, sent me a note upon hearing that I was going to retire:

 “Most of us in recreation might have an easier time viewing retirement as walking toward opportunities rather than away from our past. Someone asked me what I want from this next period of life, and I think it’s contemplation, engagement in all kinds of activities and adventurous experiences, deepening of relationships, encounters with the transcendent, and a whole lot of laughs. I wish all that for you too.”

I am making my encore performance all those things. My wish is that others can experience their later life in a similar way.