January 17, 2021
The biggest change in my recent life is retirement. I sold my engineering company in Calgary over a year ago and moved to Kelowna. It has been a good change. The weather is way nicer out here. All the family (parents, siblings, kids) still reside Calgary so I will always have a pull to go there. For now, Kelowna is home, and I am fully enjoying it.
Retirement is a really big topic and there is no way I can address everything at one time. Let’s try to keep it simple for now.
What is retirement? Most would say to relax, enjoy the fruits of your working career and travel the world. Guess what – Covid put an end to the travel part. You can only watch TV for so long before you go stir crazy and need to do something. If you travel – it won’t be 24/7 – so what will you do with the other 40 weeks of the year? And…you can only eat so much fruit.
Currently, I find that my challenge is to find something that I am passionate about – at least as it relates to retirement. What will keep me busy and engaged in the years to come.
I seem to have lots of hobbies – photography, wood working, music, golf. (hopefully this new blog). Maybe that is enough. Each one of those activities can keep me busy. Maybe I am just looking for too much meaning. There needs to be some purpose. The kids are all grown up, so I don’t need to look after them anymore. Do I volunteer at the “soup kitchen”? There are lots of opportunities to volunteer for stuff, but again, I don’t have a passion. Where do you start and how do you move forward?
I have friends in Calgary who are still working. They are all getting close to that retirement age. Many don’t have a clear picture of what retirement will look like, so they keep working. I have family who are still working, thinking that retirement is waiting for them. I’m not sure if they know what they will be doing.
Here in Kelowna, I have many acquaintances who are retired and have been retired for years now. They all seem to have figured it out. Maybe they can share the secret.
That’s is for now. Let’s hear what you have to say.
Ronco 😊
@MarieAnne
I agree. Work is about the people. Somehow you need to replace the work interactions with retired interactions. So far, being part of the golf course has helped immensely. I need to put myself out there to create more interactions. Certainly, with Covid this is a bigger challenge.
The health thing scares me sometimes. Life can change in an instant. Car Crash comes to mind. In a flash everything changes. We have friends whose son was T-boned before Christmas and it’s been hell ever since. You don’t need to be retired to be affected with health issues. I’m sure that I feel fine now, but as the years go by I get more and more nagging pains. Eventually it…
I have been semi retired for a few years now and the only thing I miss about work is the people I used to work with. So, in retirement I need to surround myself with people and it can be challenging at times because the people you meet after you are retired, you don’t necessarily have a lot in common with. It is a complicated navigation process.
One thing I find with a lot of people who are retired, there sometimes is a perception that you are going to be healthy and active and well until one day, you die. Well, that is not the case.
Even if you do everything the health experts say and follow all the guidelines,…