Becoming Prudence Sand

Four plus decades ago, I embarked on a graduate program in comparative literature. I was joined by a small cohort of equally earnest twenty-somethings and by... Prudence Sand.  At the time, Prudence seemed both ancient and eccentric to the rest of us. (I've since discovered she was in her mid sixties at the time, a long-time widow, and an accomplished poet.) The rest of us were intent on becoming college professors and shaping young minds. Apparently, Prudence was simply interested in learning for its own sake.

A few years later, I decided that a career in academia wasn't my cup of tea and left graduate school behind for a more pragmatic career, first in government, then in business. And I forgot all about Prudence Sand.

My career progressed, and we started a family.  Like many young working mothers, I loved my hectic life but bemoaned the complete lack of "me time." My only reading was either bed-time stories or work-related material. Not a good juicy novel in sight. I used to tell the occasional college student I met "Enjoy every minute of being a full-time student. You'll never again have the luxury just to read and learn."

Fast-forward 25 years and I find that "never again" threat to by an empty one. I do have the time and the luxury just to read and learn. Actually going back to school isn't really an option right now. I need flexibility to help with our grandkids and travel the world. Instead, I've embarked on a self-directed "masters of eclectic knowledge." I read widely and voraciously and enjoy it immensely. Learning just for the sake of learning. Lucky me.  I've become Prudence Sand.

Quote of the Day -- Roald Dahl

We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.

-- Roald Dahl

Quote of the Day -- Joseph Coughlin

Aging well is not about finding a place to rest. It’s about living in a place that pulls and pushes you out of your rocking chair. 

-- Joseph F. Coughlin, Ph.D.

Quote of the Day -- Victor Hugo

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

-- Victor Hugo

A College of My Own Making

Various moments in life give rise to self-examination -- why am I here, what do I want to be "when I grow up?"  Moments like heading off to college, reaching a career decision-point, having a baby, facing a mid-life crisis. Retirement is one of those moments. What constitutes a "good" retirement, in general and for me in particular? When I was preparing to retire, I did quite a bit of reading. Some of it was very helpful; some seemed a little silly. A recurring theme for a good retirement, just as it is for life before retirement, is balance. It's just that the balancing act becomes a bit different.

We all know people, either in our immediate circle or through association, whose retirement is cut unfairly short by incapacitating illness or even death. So one side of the equation we retirees need to balance is "life is short." Hence, my efforts (along with my spouse and traveling companion) to see as much of the world as possible. 

On the other hand, we also know that life expectancy is considerably longer for our generation than it was for our parents or grandparents, so we need to be prepared that we might be retired for as many years as we worked. While that doesn't necessarily mean that a retiree's second act has to be another career or paid work, it does mean preparing for the possibility of many years after paid work ends, or, as Mary Catherine Bateson calls it, "Composing a Further Life."

Today marks the 7th anniversary of my retired life, and I'm still discovering what I want to do and how to feel like I'm using my time well. Lately, I've been reading a lot more and my taste continues to be eclectic. And I've been thinking about what that means and whether so much reading is an "acceptable" investment of my time.

Early in my career at IBM, many of us had the opportunity to work with a career counselor. We took some kind of vocational aptitude and interest test. I have no idea what test it was, but a comment by the counselor has stayed with me. "You have a really strong affinity for learning," he told me with considerable surprise in his voice. Apparently that was something he saw more frequently in college professors than in IBM systems engineers. And I've often said to young acquaintances headed off to college, "Enjoy these years. Never again will it be your job just to read and learn things."

Another telling self-revelation question is "who do you envy and why?" I don't strongly envy anyone at this point because I consider myself incredibly lucky to be living the life that I'm living. But if pressed, I would have to say Kerri Miller. She's my favorite public radio personality in the Twin Cities. She's a knowledgeable, insightful interviewer on a wide range of topics. She also reads widely and has a tremendous "book club" following both on and off the air. Listening to her makes me think "I'd love to have a job where someone pays me to read."

Aha! Basically, with a pension and retirement savings to support me, I do have a job where "someone" is paying me to read. Of course, voracious reading requires a balancing act of its own. What's the right mix of fiction versus non-fiction? How many guilty pleasure books do I allow myself as palate cleansers? I'm still working through creating my syllabus, a college of my own making, but suffice it to say that I agree with a fellow retiree who said "I have so many books on my 'to read' list that I'll need to live forever to finish all of them." My Goodreads list keeps growing. I don't think I'm in any danger that my "read" count will ever exceed my "to read" count.

What Age Do You Imagine?

I recently listened to a podcast that suggested you could discover something about yourself by considering whether you more often imagine yourself to be young (a teenager or twenty-something just getting started in the world) or whether you think about yourself at the end of your life looking back and imparting wisdom.

So I wonder what it says about me that I lack the imagination to think about myself at any other age than what I am today?  I certainly remember being young, in high school or college, being a not-so-young parent, struggling to juggle a career and kids. But I really can't imagine being any of those things again. And I often find myself surprised when my Facebook friends have birthdays to discover how young some of them are. How many years that have yet to work. Apparently, I'm in denial about age in general.


And even though I accept that I'm now the matriarch of our little clan, I don't think of myself as old. Older yes, advanced middle age for sure, but definitely not old. Like most of my friends, I joke and complain about getting older and what it does to my body and occasionally my memory. But I struggle to envision myself being really old, and all that goes with it, like perhaps losing my independence before I'm ready. People often say that one of the beauties of youth is believing that you'll live forever. I don't know if that belief ever really goes away until you're faced with a serious illness. Blessedly, I lack the imagination to envision myself as old.


I guess the bottom line is that I'm content being just the age that I am. I'll continue to do my best to forestall the bad parts of aging and be grateful for the benefits of having reached this stage of a more leisurely contemplative life.

My Manifesto for a Full, Active Retirement

I may have mentioned a few times that I'm a Gretchen Rubin fan. I often feel guilty spending my reading / listening cycles focused on things that might make my life better and richer (instead of listening to the news), but I can only take so much (bad! depressing!) news. As part of the "know yourself better" theme, Gretchen advocates writing a manifesto about something. So I gave it a whirl last fall. So far, it seems to be withstanding the test of time... at least of 9 months of time. So here it is:

1 Savor the joys of being a grandparent. Strive to be a regular part of our grandchildren's lives on both ordinary days and special occasions.

2 Bask in the friendship, experiences, and challenges of our adult children and their partners. Provide appropriate support (time, money, advice) to make their lives easier.

3 Delight in my marriage and our good fortune that we have arrived at this stage of life with similar goals and interests.

4 Journey to as much of the world as possible, as a traveler, not a tourist.

5 Read, listen to, or watch something every day that stretches my mind.

6 Practice yoga regularly to keep my body and my mind flexible.

7 Move my body regularly doing things that I enjoy like a brisk walk in the sunshine.

8 Eat a healthy diet and maintain an acceptable weight. It's good for my quality of life and my mental well-being.

9 Achieve a balance between battling the effects of aging and accepting that I'm getting older.

10 Do meaningful volunteer work.

11 Nurture friendships.

12 Play the piano often.

13 Write regularly.



14 Be flexible and enjoy the opportunity to live without a rigid schedule or "to do" list.

15 Be structured enough so I don't fritter away my time on meaningless activities.

16 Treasure every day as a gift.

YOLO -- You Only Live Once

A friend recently posted a lovely tribute on Facebook to a much-loved aunt who died at an advanced age after living a full life. She fondly remembers that her aunt often told her "Dawn honey, do things and go places while you can - there's plenty of time at the end to sit and remember, give yourself something to remember."

We've tried to live by that advice, even before we retired and definitely since. Jim's health scares have certainly contributed to our "don't wait until it's too late" philosophy of seeing the world. But even before that... 

25+ years ago when Christie was in preschool, the father of one of her teachers died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack. He had retired just a few years before, and her parents were looking forward to seeing the world together. Suddenly her mom was faced with the prospect of seeing the world without him or giving up her dreams of travel. That made an impression.

Closer to home, when my dad was 73, he suffered a grand mal seizure for unknown reasons. It fried enough of his brain cells to permanently alter his capabilities and my parents' lifestyle. Yet another reminder of "don't wait until it's too late."

Just this week-end, we celebrated my brother's birthday with a lovely relaxed meal and conversation. In the course of the conversation, he discovered we have never been to Ireland and was appalled. It is, of course, someplace that we want to see, but his comment made me think about our priorities. We've worked our way through most of a traditional bucket list of places (Great Wall, Stonehenge, Taj Mahal, Paris, London, Rome...), but that only adds to our list of places to see.

For now, we're mostly choosing the more exotic places or the places that require exceedingly long flights (like our upcoming trip to New Zealand and Australia). We have yet to see "the Stans," Namibia, Indonesia, Patagonia, or even Japan, to name just a few. Ireland might just have to wait while we work our way through the more challenging destinations.

YOLO!

Retirement Balancing Act -- Part II

"No matter how much money you have, you can't buy more time." Bill Gates wrote that in a recent article (Three Things I Learned from Warren Buffett). If anyone should know what money can't buy, I guess it would be Bill Gates.

As someone who has always tried very hard to be constantly efficient and vigilant about time wasters, retirement poses a mental challenge. I've reached a stage in my life where it should be OK to have a more leisurely pace and even to waste a little time. But even three years into this retirement project, I'm still racked by guilt if I don't feel like my day has been productive enough.

But what does a "productive day" look like when you're retired? I want to have a full life, but I don't want to exchange the work treadmill for some other self-created treadmill. It seems obvious that I need to mentally redefine productivity in terms of quality more than quantity, but of course that is easier said than done. I have important volunteer obligations which certainly make me feel valuable and productive. But I need to take care that volunteerism doesn't become a "job" that makes me feel guilty when I'm not fully devoted to it. I didn't work so hard to earn a pension just to substitute unpaid work that carries the same baggage.

For me in retirement, the assessment of productivity at the end of the day needs to be selfish. Did I do something today to nurture my body? Did I do something today to nurture my spirit? Did I do something today to expand my mind? When I can answer "yes" to each of those questions every day, or better yet, when those things are so automatic that I no longer need to interrogate myself, then I have succeeded at the Retirement Balancing Act.

By the way, the young woman in that stunning photo is our daughter Cindy on a South Africa trip with her friends. So far, her balance (both physical and metaphorical) is much better than mine.

Retirement Balancing Act

In my later years of being a working mother, I used to advise my younger colleagues not to get complacent. As a working mom, just when you think you've got things all figured out, something will come along to throw it off kilter. It might be a new job assignment, a tough adjustment to a new teacher in school, a beloved nanny who decides to "retire." Achieving equilibrium as a working mom is a transient state, to be savored while it lasts.

For many years, I had two primary roles: mom and career. Anything else, including me-time and time with my spouse, was a distant third. I felt successful when I did a good job of balancing the "top two" and had no illusions that I was a skilled enough juggler to try for more. I loved those years and I wouldn't trade them for anything; but I had a dream. Someday, when our nest was empty, when I retired, I would have a more balanced life and nurture more than my two-dimensional self.

And now that I've been retired for almost three years, have I achieved that desirable balance? Yes and no. I've discovered that I'm simply not the type of person who does well with a disciplined routine. I exercise most days. I play the piano most days. I read most days. But not at the same time or for the same amount of time every day. That's just not me. So I find that the message about complacency that I delivered to my younger working-mom colleagues is true for retirement as well (at least so far). Equilibrium is a transient state, to be savored while it lasts. It seems to last longer in retirement, but it still takes effort and attention to achieve balance.

Reflections on a "Do It Now" Retirement

Do it now! -- Duane Comport (1923-2012) Many other people have no doubt said this, but my dad made the biggest impression on me with these words.

Three years ago, I made the decision to retire. Although I'd been debating with myself for several years, in the end, deciding to retire was easy. We'd done the spreadsheets to know I could retire. Then my mom got sick, which meant I should retire. And her illness also revealed to me how much I wanted to retire. I no longer loved my job. And I had no stomach for walking the tightrope between personal and professional life that I had accomplished so successfully (most of the time) when raising my kids. I didn't feel I had the energy to do that with an ailing mom and a no longer "do it now" dad. So, retire I did. For such a momentous decision, it was ultimately made in "Do it now!" style.

Fortunately, my mom's illness proved to be symptom-free for quite a long time. It got her in the end, in February of 2012, but until the last two months, she was relatively healthy and mentally as sharp as ever. So I had the luxury of learning to be retired and doing all the things I wanted to do, more or less, while still spending time with my parents.

That's where the "do it now" dilemma of retirement comes in. I've discovered in my almost three years of "leisure" that retirement is its own kind of balancing act -- teetering between "I should" and "why should I?"

Without the daily grind and monster to-do list, life becomes a wonderful and scary blank slate. A retiree's to-do list becomes mostly a list of your own making, with your own idiosyncratic priorities. And things that you thought you would do, such as writing regular blog posts, somehow keep getting shuffled to the bottom of the list.

I recently took a fun class -- at least fun for a "writing nerd" like me. The class reminded me of how much I love to write, which I know is hard to believe because most people hate to write. I also started reading the wonderfully funny book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I found myself saying over and over "I wish I'd written that." So I'm determined to give it a whirl. I'm not completely sure what my "voice" will be. But here I am... Just Jelan.

Reflections on OTTO

IBM, the acronym king, coined OTTO (other than traditional office) for those of us who regularly work from our homes. IBM has itself been the subject of many pet acronyms over the years -- I've Been Moved, I Bring Manuals, and most recently, I'm By Myself, which is a reflection of how many IBMers are now OTTO workers.

I was one of the early pioneers of telecommuting at IBM, starting my first OTTO job on August 1, 1990. Since my last day working at IBM will be July 30, 2010, that makes me a 20 year OTTO veteran, which is most likely close to a record.

I could probably write a book about what works and what doesn't when you spend a huge chunk of your career as a telecommuter, but at this point, I'm more interested in the impact when you retire.

First symptom of a bigger issue -- where's the retirement party? Even if my frugal employer would spring for a party (or my friends and co-workers would throw one on their own nickel), where would it be and who would come? For the past 20 years, I've had a number of different telecommuting jobs at IBM, all of them rewarding and all with many great colleagues who have become friends. None of my jobs has involved coworkers who live less than a 90 minute drive (at the least) or a 3 hour plane ride (more typical) from my home office. I keep in touch regularly with electronic means (e-mail, Facebook, instant messaging), less frequently on the phone, and occasionally in person (when I'm "on the road").

As I approach retirement, I'm discovering that some of the characteristics that have made me a great OTTO worker have also left me with a shortage of friends or even close acquaintances who live just around the corner or within reasonable commuting distance for a retirement party.

Characteristic #1 -- I'm an introvert. My friend Kelly continues to question this because I can comfortably present to a room filled with 1,000 strangers. But despite her skepticism, I'm definitely an introvert. That means I do well working at home. I don't crave constant social interaction (although I do notice that if I go weeks on end without a business trip, I get a bit squirrelly). Unfortunately, introversion also makes me less likely to actively seek out new people in my community who can be my local "friends."

Characteristic #2 -- A demanding and fulfilling personal life. I started my first OTTO job when I returned from a long maternity leave after baby #3. Christie was about 18 months; Cindy was 6 and Jeff was 9. The opportunity to work part time from my home was HUGE for our family. I am eternally grateful for the many years I was able to "be there" for the kids and still have an interesting and exciting career. Employers certainly benefit from people like me who are highly motivated to prove that telecommuting can work, and who produce great results so we can hang on to those OTTO jobs for dear life. But that juggling act didn't leave me much time for activities that didn't revolve around either work (with my remote colleagues) or family.

This isn't a moan and groan story. I have some great friends and acquaintances, and I'll make the effort to find a few more. But it is a cautionary tale for others who have spent a big chunk of their work lives in OTTO mode. We used to scoff when Bill Gates built his all electronic house and talked about virtual "dates" where people sitting in different cities would watch the same movie together and chat about it afterwards. He proved prescient, as usual. I've actually started to adopt the practice of scheduling virtual lunches with some of my remote colleagues so we can catch up on each other's news.

I'm very grateful that I have many friends and acquaintances across the country and around the world (many of whom we hope to visit in person on our travels). But I'm also very aware that as a long time OTTO worker, I need to make a conscious effort to get out there in my own community.

Quote of the day -- Ernie J Zelinski

Retirement is not a time to sleep, but a time to awaken to the beauty of the world around you.

-- Ernie J Zelinski

Let the retirement countdown begin! T-30

I've known my retirement date (July 30, 2010) for about a month. So have my family, a few close friends, and my boss (of course). But today, we "went public." My boss sent out an e-mail. Then I sent out a somewhat more expansive e-mail and posted to my Facebook status. It has been fun and exciting (and a bit sad) to receive so many responses already. I'll miss the work a little, and I'll miss the people a lot!
Blogging has been on my "to do" list for quite awhile. I was all set to blog professionally awhile back, but I'd reached a stage in my career where I just didn't feel that I wanted to strongly align my identity with my job and my "products." (Perhaps my hesitancy about doing that should have been a clue that the retirement glimmer was glowing brighter than I realized.) So here I am on the brink of retirement, ready to start blogging.
So why blog now? Because I think writing is a good way to capture ideas and clarify thought. But then why not just write a personal journal? Because I've enjoyed reading blogs of people who do a good job of discovering things that I might not have found myself. Or who start a conversation about interesting topics. Now that I'll have more leisure to "find stuff," I hope that I can eventually start to provide that same service for my busier, still employed friends near and far.
Enough for day one. Soon it will be T-29!