4 Lessons From 4 Years of Retirement

Whether retirement is in your distant future or is knocking on the door, just around the corner, it’s useful to understand what life will be like when you’re not clocking in, badging in, doing rounds, or anything else. In today’s post, we’ll take a look at four lessons — one for each year — that one retiree has learned.

Many folks wonder what retirement is “really” like.  In my final years of work, I wondered about it a lot. I’ve spent the past four years in retirement, and they’ve been the best years of my life.  To capture my lessons from retirement (and, to help those who wonder what it’s really like), I’ve been writing a series of posts on various milestones in my retirement.

My Biggest Lessons From Retirement

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As I wrote in my very first post, this blog “is the story of my journey, told in The Present before it becomes The Past.”  Now that the early days of my retirement have become The Past, I’m thankful that I captured them while they were still in The Present.

My thoughts are different now.  Time has a way of doing that. In my earliest days of retirement, the focus was on Freedom.  The following quote from my first week captures this sentiment well:

Freedom to do whatever we want to do, whenever we want to do it.   For the first time in our lives.  Wow, that’s big.  And THAT, in my mind, is what the first week of retirement is really like.

Looking back, that sense of newfound Freedom was certainly the highlight of early retirement.  After decades of grinding it out at work, the handcuffs had been unlocked.  It was an amazing feeling, but I don’t think that’s one of the biggest lessons from retirement.  It is, rather, simply a reality of life without work.

As I finished my first year of retirement, I realized life goes on after you retire. By the two-year mark, I realized retirement is fluid, and you need to learn how to roll with it. The following quote from year two captures that mindset:

Retirement changes as the days go by, and it’s best to embrace the fluidity.  Go with the flow, listen to your mind, and follow your instincts.

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