Many people tend to go by the school calendar rather than the regular calendar. This is the time of year when the kids go back to school, the peak holiday season comes to an end and the falling leaves remind you that times are changing. If you’re retired, especially newly retired like me, you might be feeling a little left out at the moment. You’ve left your old team while your colleagues and friends are getting back into the commitment and pace of their careers. Trying something new would be just the thing!
A new activity is wonderful for your brain and your social network, and it’s a great reminder that you’re a lifelong learner. Plus, you might discover something you like. My friends tried pickleball just once and immediately after the game they went out to buy their own racquets. Now they’re regulars! Another friend started painting with brush on canvas a few years ago and had three of his pieces in art shows this summer. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you recently saw my first (and second) haiku.
What things interest you? Make a list. Or dig a little deeper with the exercise from Ernie Zielinski’s book How to retire wild, happy & free. He asks you to sit down for a while and think about detailed options for retirement activities by recording very specific personal considerations. I’m not a very good diagram thinker so may have left a few corners off and have since given the book to someone else who was totally excited about exploring retirement activities! So I can’t look it up. Suffice it to say that the author thinks it’s worthwhile to think not only about the things you enjoy doing now or have always wanted to try, but also the places your interests have taken you in the past. These could make a very promising list of activities to try again.
Maybe also include a list of challenges that make the activities seem impossible for you right now—and another list of things you could do to overcome those challenges. For example, if membership fees are prohibitive, explore the possibility of volunteering your time at the location where you want to do an activity. Decades ago, my mother wanted to take an aqua aerobics class, so she offered to volunteer to look after the kids in the childcare room while their parents went swimming. In return, they gave her a free pass to aqua aerobics every time she volunteered. She could take the class she wanted, plus interact with kids, which was also one of her favorite things to do. If volunteering is a part of your own accomplishment of an activity, it is certainly already fulfilling on several levels.
So I started with Mr. Zielinski’s basic idea and then implemented it for myself. My page is filled with notes and arrows to various ideas, including the activities I’ve already committed to that are non-negotiable. These include yoga, being a dedicated friend, working part-time, helping my neighbors, and practicing self-care (for me: massage, chiropractic, walks, and getting enough rest to do all the other things on the list!). It’s already a long list, but putting it in writing makes everything very clear. I had also thought that maybe I’d be sitting behind an easel in retirement, but then I wrote it down and saw that there were many other things on the list that I’m more passionate about. I’ve documented it, and when I update the list one day, maybe it will be at the top. But for now, I may join a very amateur choir (which was a surprise to me and will be surprising to others who have heard me sing! No one said we have to be good at the things we write on our lists!)
Try making your own list and then trying out some of the items on it – and if those don’t work, try the next items on the list. No matter how many things you try before something sticks, I still think that all of this sounds a lot more interesting than what awaits our ex-workers returning to the 9-to-5 job!
Visit Sandy’s website at LifeInRetirement.ca
