Has the time of lockdown during COVID 19 given you a glimpse of retirement life? And have you enjoyed it?
I have been semi-retired and busy now for a few years and I think the time of the full stage lockdown was when I have appreciated the chance to slow down and practice being at home more. Inevitably, as so many others have found, when you’re home, you note all those little tidying jobs you were going to do. And you think about the hobbies you were going to take up as well.
Or you can just put them all off. I rang my cousin a few weeks into our enforced isolation and she told me she had a new hobby, procrastination. Sounded good to me but I decided to put it off. Ha ha!
And, as we wrote in a previous post, this time of isolation has given us the chance to enjoy and evaluate the time with our partner. https://retirementbooks.com.au/how-your-relationship-can-survive-and-thrive-during-covid-19-isolation/
For those who are not yet retired but contemplating its arrival in the next few years, this time may have been a chance to practice retirement and to think about what it means. Many may have considered that the word “retirement” implies old and no longer relevant.
Then again, maybe retirement is not what we once thought. After all, we live in an era when stereotypes are to be broken down and perceptions revised.
It’s possible that we can become so occupied with our busy lives that we do not take the time to reflect on retirement, what we truly want and what we can let go of – until now. Maybe being busy is not the way to stay young but agile thinking and adaptability are.
Maybe retiring is the wrong word. Perhaps it is a process of rewiring or rethinking concepts about how to live, what is important, and how to manage the resources we’ve been given. Time is one of the most precious ones and when we slow down, we can savour it.
So, with some luck, during this slowed down time you have worked out what is going to be important and how you are going to live when you have the chance to retire from your working life.
