Tag Archives: living fully

No Fear Retirement

Although I believe that we are all still Too Young to Retire® I also know that there are many fears about the transitions from full time careers into new and uncertain phases of our lives. One of our 2Young2Retire® certified facilitators, Pamela Houghton, has published a new book, No Fear Retirement, written for anyone who is thinking about, or has already embarked upon, retirement.

No Fear Retirement addresses ten of the most common concerns of those who are thinking about retirement. Whether your fears are around finances, your relationships, where you will live, your identity, or something else, this book is a valuable resource. Taking time to reflect on the Pause for Thought questions along the twelve phases of retirement or associated with the ten most common fears, will make this read well worthwhile and may help you enjoy a more fun-filled and fulfilling life if or when you retire. For more information visit Pamela Houghton’s website: http://www.retirementsunlimited.co.uk/

Paul G. Ward
President

Gratefulness

Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States of America. It is a day when we remind ourselves of all the things we can be grateful for. As many of you know, my Mother passed away last month. She was 86 years old and married to my Father for 66 years. I am grateful to have been brought into this world by such a wonderful person. I am also grateful for the opportunity of staying with my Father, in the home in which I grew up, for much of the time since her passing. I know he is grateful for the 66 years of married life and is missing his life-long companion more than words can tell. For all of you who have lost loved ones, my hope is that, as you progress through these life transitions, you can feel and express your gratefulness for everything they brought into your lives.

At 2Young2Retire, gratefulness abounds. In addition to being grateful for all our family and friends we are grateful for the opportunity to serve those experiencing life’s transitions. I am also grateful for the kind thoughts, cards, and emails coming my way over the past few weeks and look forward to continuing our interactions. Happy Thanksgiving!

Paul G. Ward

Dream the Impossible Dream

Congratulations to swimmer Diana Nyad on her successful Cuba to Florida crossing. Diana’s success came on her fourth attempt at the age of 64. Emerging from the water at Key West on September 2, 2013, Diana is reported to have told waiting TV crews: “I have three messages: one is we should never ever give up; two is you are never too old to chase your dreams; and three is it looks like a solitary sport but it is a team.” After three previous unsuccessful attempts, this dream may have seemed impossible but Diane never gave up chasing her dream. Diane is the first person to swim from Cuba to the US without a shark cage. Whatever your dream, and however impossible is seems, today’s message is: dream the impossible dream then make it happen.

Baby boomer suicides on the increase

Increasing suicide rates among baby boomers has been widely reported in the press this week. Rather than analyzing the causes of the increase, my thoughts went to how the 2young2retire® community help those affected by suicidal thoughts and those left behind after such a tragic end.

Much of the work of 2young2retire® facilitators is in creating small communities for connection and conversation. Conversations can be about careers, health, financial matters, travel, relationships, or any other topic of interest. Members of the group can select the topic. Reflecting on the past is interesting but looking forward with purpose can stimulate positive thinking and new directions. We all face challenges in our lives but what can we do to help those in greatest need, those who think life is simply not worth living, find something positive?

Reach out to someone today. Create a conversation that matters between two people or a larger group and stimulate some positive thinking.

Celebrating Dr. Leila Denmark

Leila Denmark’s passing last week has been well reported in the news media. Dr. Leila, 114 years old when she died, was world’s oldest practicing physician when she gave up her practice at 103 years of age. Dr. James Hutcherson, one of Dr. Leila’s grandsons, is reported to have said, “She absolutely loved practicing medicine more than anything else in the world. She never referred to practicing medicine as work.”

“You keep on doing what you do best, as long as you can,” Denmark told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I enjoyed every minute of it for more than 70 years. If I could live it over again, I’d do exactly the same thing.”

Dr. Leila Denmark is a wonderful role model for all of us who are Too Young To Retire®. We celebrate the life of this exceptional physician.

Reflections on a Sobering Day

We are visiting family in another part of the country and having a lively conversation about David Eagleman, the neuroscientist, and how a childhood accident left him with an insatiable curiosity about Time.  Eagleman had fallen off a roof and survived, sans most of the cartilege in his nose, but having experienced during the fall a slowing down of time that would shape who he was and would become.  Many accident victims report something similar, and the suggestion is that time is perhaps far more malleable than we suppose, or perhaps it is just our perception of time that is squishy, or possible there is no difference between time itself and how we perceive it.

Before long, the older people around our brunch table were inevitably drawn to memories of 9/11, the day we Americans got a horrific reminder we were not invulnerable from the violence that many other people around the world live with on a daily basis.   This conversation seemed oddly related to the previous one in my mind, because it has become almost cliche to note that time also stood still for many of us on that September morning.  We remember with astounding clarity where we were when we first learned of the attack.  Some were watching their favorite morning talk shows, others were at work, others were away from home (like us) on vacation.  We remember who we were with, who notified us, and when we got the news, exactly the moment we became fused into one nation, watching the horror unfold — like exceptionally well-done special effects, noted someone — then repeated and repeated throughout the morning in what has since become a media tic.

What I recalled of that time, with something of a sinking feeling, was how quickly the event itself — once we became exhausted by those awful first images — got lost in translation as we attempted to got understand how this could possibly have happened to us.   Why do They hate us?  we wanted to know.  Who could have foreseen the macabre celebrity many indulged in, claiming a relation or friend or friend of a friend among those who perished.  Six degrees of separation bringing us all together first in a sense of national unity rarely seen since, then swiftly dissipating into something less admirable.

I wonder how many of the families of 9/11 really want this annual reliving of their terrible losses, culminating in this anniversary?  Are they eager to revisit the moment when, like for victims of an accident, time literally stood still.  And after which, they would feel themselves permanently changed.  There are a few among the families of those who died willing to say they are exhausted by the annual rituals of mourning.  How courageous they are to declare what many of us are thinking: Enough.

There were children at our table today, listening quietly.  After awhile, a 13 year old echoed this:  Wasn’t it time to move on, he asked us, his elders.  If we keep on reliving this every year, the terrorists will have won.  Something to ponder on this sobering anniversary.

Re-Housing Our(elder)selves

About 15 years ago, we went in search of a new home, and a new type of home.  Somehow the concept of  co-housing had floated into our head space. We were attracted to the idea of  ‘building a better society, one neighborhood at a time,’ to quote the current official cohousing slogan.  This was pre-grandchildren and the appeal of sharing a planned community with people of all ages, including small children, seemed vastly more appealing than the 55+ adult gated communities then being marketed.  So we signed up for a co-housing conference in Maryland where a new community was forming, and the following year we toured four communities, Cantine’s Island, in Saugerties, NY, award-winning  Windsong in Langley, BC, Quayside Village in North Vancouver, and Trillium Hollow in Portland, OR (a city where some of our family already lived).  Of these, only Windsong was completed and occupied at the time.  We attended open houses at all of these, and spent a night at Windsong.  We even joined two of them at the minimal membership level. People were friendly and welcoming, some were close to messianic about their chosen form of living.  Forming a co-housing community is a long and challenging process and a few ‘burning souls’ are essential to sustain the effort.

We supported the living lightly on the planet philosophy of co-housing communities of which EcoVillage in Ithaca, NY, is perhaps the best known example.  We liked the self-governance ideals, the espousal of diversity.  We were attracted to the idea of a neighborhood planned to maximize contact among the residents, a kind of  y’all come, potluck ethos very different from most suburbs, including where we live now in South Florida.

The closest we’ve come to that kind of community sensibility was our eight years in Hoboken, NJ, where everything one needed was within walking distance.   If street life didn’t bring you into contact with a neighbor or two and the possibility of a social event, stoop life — hanging out on a balmy evening on your own front steps — certainly did.  It was a small town in every sense of the word, with Manhattan right across the Hudson River.

For us, the downside of co-housing was governance by consensus.  At one of the just-forming communities we toured, I sat next to one of the members in a meeting.  An open house usually includes a pot luck and an invitation to whatever is happening so visitors can get a sense of community process.  This meeting was about landscaping and it went on and on and on, and finally broke up with no decision.  The woman looked at me very kindly and said, “If you’re serious, get used to it.”  I gather that some communities have modified this form of governance.

Today, as co-housing has evolved and grown (there are communities in 37 states and several Canadian provinces), there is more variation in community aspirations including the introduction of the concept of co-housing for elders (a word I prefer) developed by architect and co-housing in America champion, Chuck Durrett.  I’ve heard Chuck speak at an American Society on Aging session and his arguments (read here) for elders living in a community are starting to make a lot of sense to me…again.  I guess you could say it’s deja vu all over again, but with a sense of urgency that I could not have experienced in a pre-grandchilden, pre-Inconvenient Truth, Union of Concerned Scientists report world.

More reading:

Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living, Charles Durrett

See also: Dr. Bill Thomas’s The Greenhouse Project

Not That Easy Being Green?

Well, easy no (Kermit, my friend), but possible.  You will have to make changes in how you live that seem so small they couldn’t possibly have an impact.  You will risk making friends uncomfortable.  You may be labeled Treehugger — like there’s something wrong with appreciating a reliable source of oxygen.  Don’t be surprised to learn that innovation will probably begin at the grass roots — hey, that’s us, particularly those of us old enough to remember when Global Warming was barely a blip on the radar.  If we keep working, our solutions and ideas will percolate up to those in power, or maybe we’ll create a new power base.

We have to embrace activism but without the us vs. them, blame-and-shame game that tends to alienate people when we can spare no one.  We need to “act as if what we want is already true,” to paraphrase a quote circulating in New Age circles.  Author and expert on the power of intention, Lynne McTaggart had a radical suggestion about the spill in the Gulf in the three-part teleconference series: The Gulf Call to Sacred Action.  She suggested to her listeners that we stop demonizing BP for this disaster which could have occurred at any one of hundreds of deep water drilling sites, and start imagining that BP engineers are successful at capping the leak.  And then, imagine that the massive cleanup that follows unites people and resources in unprecedented, effective ways.  McTaggart is best known for her research into the power of intention (The Intention Experiment, Free Press — Simon & Schuster 2007).  Other visionaries on the call: Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston.

We need to find, fund, nurture, and support people who are working on solutions:

Here are a few examples:

“It’s not that easy being green
Having to spend each day the color of the leaves…
But green’s the color of Spring.
And green can be cool and friendly-like.
And green can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain,
or tall like a tree…”

Busier Than Ever

What is it about modern life that makes us take such pride in being busy?  The question occurred to me recently when I had a brief encounter on the street with a former colleague who told me she had been busier than ever since we parted company about a year ago.   I politely listened to her catalog of comings and goings, but I could not bring myself to get into the game of dueling packed schedules.  In fact, I didn’t get a chance and that’s just as well because a. it’s not a game worth winning, and b. what I do in any given day isn’t necessarily the most important thing to me.

On many days, I cannot give an accounting of where the time went, nor do I wish to.  This may seem an odd admission for a longtime journal keeper, but a good day for me is when I have paused to appreciate some aspect of my life, or noticed or learned something new, however minuscule.  (For example, I just a second ago realized that I have been misspelling the word ‘minuscule’ forever, and that I am so not alone in this that one online dictionary gives ‘miniscule’ as a ‘variant.’  Nice of them. )  At the end of my day, I feel I’ve lived it well if I exercised a skill or talent; connected with another human being in a meaningful way; laughed; moved my body; performed some small act that may possibly improve the world.  I live in the “smile at the neighbor even when you don’t want to” and  “pick up litter when you see it” scale of  things.  Minuscule, but meaningful…at least, to me.

I suppose it is no surprise that a workaholic culture would make a virtue of busyness.  But, we might well ask, as Thoreau did:  “It is not enough to be busy.  The question is: What are we busy about?”  In truth there is a dark, addictive side to busyness,  according to Sally Kempton, a teacher of meditation and yogic philosophy.   Click here for some ideas on the subject and antidotes worth trying.

I say, if you find yourself obsessed with schedules and constantly crunched for time, don’t compound the problem by bragging about it.  Try something radical: sit down and catch your breath, pick up a musical instrument or a sketchpad,  open a book, call a friend you have been meaning to talk to.  And if you are lucky enough to connect on that first try, let them know you have all the time in the world to talk.  It will be a gift to you both.

Check out:

The Slow Movement

Zen Habits

Live Longer, Lighten Up

With a headline like that, you’re expecting some dieting tips a la Dr. Mehmet Oz, right?  Nope.  What inspired this post were two things.

First, this morning, we took a walk along the beach and I found myself wondering who lives in these sprawling homes so precariously perched along the water as if challenging the next hurricane to take them out?  But the better question is why anyone needs that much space.  There are two double-wide homes in particular, next to each other, in competition perhaps.  I can’t help but think how much energy must go into maintaining this kind of lifestyle, not to mention the stress on the body/mind.

Second, when we returned to our relatively modest home seven miles inland, I opened up my laptop to Seth Godin’s blog and as often happens found a post that spoke to me.  It is built around an article about living more lightly from a devoted backpacker.  So, I’m looking around my desk and, yikes!  Laptop, printer/phone/fax combo, lamp, another phone, Rolodex, cup of pens, most of which I never use, stapler, holders for this and that, box of mints, post-it notes.  Then, the tangle of wires under the desk and the stack files of papers on the floor…let’s not even go there.  I’m nauseous.

One of the things you realize as you age is how little you really need to be contented.  In a warm climate, it’s even less: a pair of shorts, t-shirt and sandals and you’re dressed.  A piece of fruit, half a bagel and tea, and breakfast is done.  A good book, a good conversation, a walk in nature — what could be better?  Thoreau’s advice (Simplify!  Simplify!) rings louder in my ears these days, and I find myself less tempted by the life-is-beautiful catalogs that continue to arrive in my mailbox every week.

That said, I’m the last person to give advice on clutter, so just read the link and see if it opens up a space in your head like it did in mine — the right place to start.