Big Things and Little Things: The Prizes the Come With Retirement

I was planning on posting to this blog on the 24th of each month, the anniversary of my retirement. I am late for May, partly because on the 24th my great-niece graduated from 8th grade, and partly because I had to think about what I wanted to say. And I finally figured out that I wanted to talk about big things and little things that changed for me with retirement.

As I said, on the 24th of May I went to my great-niece’s 8th grade graduation. A big deal for her, of course, and I am so proud of her – Valedictorian, Academic Decathlon, humpty-eleven GPA all three years of middle school, etc. But it was a big deal for me, too, because I was there! Before my retirement, this was no sure thing. I might have been off, but I might have been working, too.

Several weekends in a row I have gone to my local Ace Hardware. I have shopped there plenty of times before, but never on weekends, because I was working. Guess what! They have caramel popcorn on Saturday and Sunday! A little thing that means a lot to me. I now go to Ace a lot on weekends.

And there is more.

I never used to sit on my back patio. There never seemed to be enough time, even on my days off, to enjoy my patio, because I had things that needed to get done. Yeah, I still have things to get done, but they don’t need to be done. So, on more than one occasion, I have sat out on the patio in the late morning, after working in the yard, listening to the birds and occasionally drifting off into a nap. What a miracle for me!

Not long after I retired I took the blackout curtains off of my bedroom and bathroom windows. Let the light come in; it won’t bother me! And I leave my bedroom window slightly open at night, just because I can. Yeah, I could before, but I never felt like it.

Same with opening windows and doors during the day. Before retirement, I never bothered, at least not as often, because I would always have to close them again to go do stuff. With retirement came the luxury of letting the breezes drift through the house, and with them the sounds of the world outside.

I used to have my lights on in the rooms I was in and sometimes the ones I wasn’t in, just because I didn’t feel like opening the blinds. Since retirement, I haven’t closed my kitchen or bedroom blinds in weeks. Even my office blinds stay open most of the day if I am home, so I don’t need to use the lights.

I am, as many of you probably know, a TV addict. I have at least one TV on most of the time, usually watching the news or home improvement shows, even if it is just background noise to something else I am doing. Or maybe I should say “had”. More and more since retirement, I have turned the TV off – it is off right now – and enjoy the silence. A welcome change to my life that I would not have anticipated in retirement.

I have been working in the yard, working to clean up the garage, working on organizing my house, working on putting some more pictures on the wall – yes, train pictures that have been sitting in storage since I moved. And I am not in a hurry to get any of it done, but I am loving every minute of it.

Much to my surprise, I don’t worry about anything now that I am retired. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if this thing or that thing that I did at work will get me in trouble. I don’t worry about missing something. I don’t worry about money – as long as I don’t live past 81. As I said before, I don’t worry about getting something done today; I have tomorrow to do it. I don’t worry about a thing!

Although there must be many more things, the one last one I will mention is watching sports. I used to have this bad luck that the weekend I was off, if I had one, inevitably there was no sports on TV that I wanted to watch. Now, I can watch whatever I want, especially golf and football (when it comes on again). A little thing that is so meaningful to me.

In summary, all of the little things and big things add up to this:
retirement is the prize you win for surviving infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and middle age; in my case the first 65 years of my life.