Freedom = A Leisurely Retirement
As we head into summer, our mindset shifts from work to more time to play and enjoy leisure activities. We’re planning vacations with family and friends in anticipation of work slowing down. While everyone plans their summer schedule and colleagues are often away, work activities morph into slow-motion. We look forward to having more free time to do what we want to do and be who we want to be, even if it’s just for a few months.
I remember when I was working as a high school counselor, summers were always totally free and I could sleep longer, visit with family in New York, have lunch with friends, take a vacation, and read some good books. By the end of that 6 to 8-week period, I was always ready to go back to work. What made this vacation time different from retirement was that I always knew this summer break was time-limited.
When viewed from the outside, retirement can often look like a never-ending summer. We fantasize about being free to do what we want to do, when we want to do it, and deciding where we want to live as we define our lifestyle on our own terms. We’ll have no pressures imposed by anyone else but ourselves.
A Retirement Myth
My retirement will be like one long vacation with lots of leisure time.
Why not? You’ve worked hard for most of your adult life. For decades, you’ve made a lot of sacrifices so you could get a good education, get married, provide for your family, and progress in your career. As you look forward to this next important stage of your life, you dream about having more time for yourself to do the things that you never had time to do. You find yourself fantasizing about traveling, hobbies, physical activities, sports, etc. After you retire from work, you are sure that you will settle into a life of leisure with no schedule, no should’s and ought’s, no deadlines or goals. You believe that you will finally be free. This is what has historically been called a “retirement to leisure.” Too often, this is depicted in magazine ads with a pair of beach chairs under an umbrella on a beautiful sandy beach facing the shore. These visuals seem to scream “I have nothing to do but enjoy life.”
Unfortunately, after about a year or so of this kind of thinking, many retirees end up feeling like there is something seriously wrong with this dream they have always had. Many feel like they are on a boat adrift at sea with no course, no identified ports to visit, and no purpose. As a man I met on one of our trips to Florida once told me, “You can only play so many rounds of golf and go out to dinner with friends so many times before it gets very boring.” Often, we’re faced with a conflict between wanting to be idle and relaxed and staying engaged with some degree of purpose. How do you find a healthy balance between these two conflicting objectives?
Drawing A Distinction
There’s a distinction between being on vacation and being retired. Most of us have been on vacation many times throughout our lives. We all have discovered that a vacation is a great way to “vacate” the busy, stressful activities of daily living and just relax, enjoying the time away. As we experience this bliss, it’s only natural that we think this is the way retirement should and will be. This is the “old concept,” popularized in the in the 50s, 60s and 70s of a retirement to leisure. Our Boomers generation has redefined this old model by adding a healthy dose of purpose and meaning to retirement.
Just as our generation is redefining retirement, we are also redefining our “old concept” of leisure activities. We used to define leisure as activities that were fun and mindless. The new definition of leisure, defined by Richard Johnson in his book The New Retirement, reflects our generation’s contemporary attitude about leisure. He states that leisure is “the degree to which you have found personally satisfying endeavors outside of your work/career arena which rejuvenate your body, stimulate your mind and enrich your spirit.” This is a concept of engagement and not the disengagement attitude of previous generations. Incorporating these two new definitions of leisure and retirement, we have a new concept we call a “leisurely retirement.”
Leisure Redefined
Pre- and post-retirement provide wonderful opportunities to discover the 3 Es of leisure: explore, experience, and enjoy. Explore, experience, and enjoy all of the leisure choices that are out there and available to you. There are literally hundreds of them: hobbies, sports, college/adult courses, volunteer groups, creative pursuits, art, music, dance, and travel, just to name a few. We are never too old to integrate the 3 Es into our lives. That is the fun part of the freedom that retirement can afford us.
You Decide
A variety of physical, intellectual, social, and emotional stimulation invites all of us into a holistic way of looking at our leisure activities. They can be interspersed into your life with or without full-time or part-time work. Those activities can include but are not limited to the following categories:
- Social Activities: Engaging in interpersonal interactions with friends, family, colleagues, and new acquaintances from casual to planned or organized
- Spectating: Watching others participate in an activity/sport
- Creative Expression: Hobbies that help you discover your creative talents in art, cooking, writing, music, etc.
- Intellectual Stimulation: Interests that stimulate and enhance your mind and creative thinking like reading, taking classes, attending lectures, learning something new, etc.
- Physical Exercise: Any endeavor that invites you to move your body for physical fitness, creative expression, and everyday movements
- Solitary Pursuits: Pastimes that are done alone like reading, video games, bird watching, etc.
Here are some additional thoughts to consider in defining a “leisurely retirement.”
- No matter what stage of life you are in, be sure to integrate leisure into your life so that you can carry those activities into retirement
- Be aware that stress can be created by under-loading your lifestyle as well as overloading it
- Any leisure that becomes a full-time endeavor is no longer leisure but has taken the place of a job
- Leisure provides the gift of serenity, creativity, exercise, intellectual stimulation, rejuvenation, and the opportunity to discover your authentic self
- Leisure is only one aspect of retirement as there are many more aspects to be integrated into your retirement lifestyle
Begin now to explore this unique opportunity to discover which leisure activities will bring you rejuvenation of mind, body, and spirit. Here are some Web sites and a booklet to get your creative juices going:
- www.iexplore.com
- www.findmeahobby.com
- www.retirementwithapurpose.com/hobbies
- Leisure Activities Finder (LAF), a booklet of over 700 activities that match the Holland Code for career exploration. It is available from Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. at www.parinc.com.
Now go create your own leisurely retirement while you make the very best of this wonderful time of your life.
Dee
Dee Cascio
Author, speaker, Licensed Psychotherapist, Certified Life Coach, Retirement Lifestyle/ReCareer Coach, and Life and Work Transitions Strategies Coach.
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