This month is a little bit of a dry run for retirement. With one contract ending at the end of April and the others starting in June, May was always going to be a light month. Right now? I’m scarily enjoying it and worried that it is being frittered away too easily. You just can’t make me happy.
First up, I’m getting ahead on my yard and housework. It is amazing to me that even working part-time, I can still manage to get behind. But on Monday, I spent 4½ hours mowing and trimming our lawn until it looked like a well-manicured green carpet. On Tuesday, I super-cleaned our fireplace room and planted basil in the outdoor planters. I also added flowers in my whiskey barrel, did a little bit of real work and prepped parts of the food for our dinner party on Thursday. Today? I’m deep cleaning the bathrooms around here. I have a list, I’m checking it twice and our lives are about to be fully under control.
Honestly, that’s a little bit of my crazy coming out and a whole lot of what genuinely calms me down. Once I can get our lives as fully under control as possible, the house feels calm and quiet. Once it’s calm and quiet? It becomes – again – that safe and soft spot to land.
It’s hard not to get a little bit reflective, though, as I while away my days getting things back in order. At my heart, I’m still in a place where I want to work a little bit and be retired a whole lot. Obviously, retirement appeals. I’m ready to slow down and just be for awhile. Still, the thought of not earning money, not using what little skills I have and not interacting with others is scary to me. I really do feel like I may get a little bored if I don’t work at least a few hours a week, particularly when my husband is still working. Let’s face it, I need a buddy and he’s legally obligated to be my friend.
Mostly though, I’m trying to follow my husband’s advice and just enjoy this time. As he said again last night, soon enough I will be busier than I want to be again. When that happens, I’ll regret that I didn’t enjoy this time. So outside of super-cleaned bathrooms today, I am going to focus just the smallest bit on finding my Zen.
A little bit of that Zen is the daydream, right? I like to think about days on end when there are no obligations and we can just be. I like to think about going for bike rides in summer, alpine skiing in winter and harvesting both fruits and vegetables from our gardens. I like to wax poetic about snuggling furry ones, movie nights at home with popcorn and outdoor fires with a bourbon and s’mores. I like to dream about reading books on end, staying in 10K shape and making interesting and healthy meals. It’s all part of the Zen.
But there is a greater part of the Zen that I have to dig deeper to fully appreciate. It’s the Zen of quiet. I’m a rather anxious person. I’m also very driven and overly planned. I often feel like life rushes by before I’ve had the chance to enjoy the moment and even when I tell myself to stop and enjoy the moment, my mind races forward to the next thing. In full retirement, I believe that quiet will become commonplace. That somehow, I’ll finally learn to relax and in doing so, I can stop life from rushing by. That the next time I tell myself to stop and simply enjoy, I will actually be able to do it. That the thought of missing one minute, one hour or one day isn’t a “loss” on the ledger sheet of life.
Right now, the days already going by. My month “off” is already six days old. The house hasn’t been fully cleaned yet and the deals for June haven’t been fully inked. The grass is growing again, wiping out the great progress I made on Monday. I am already feeling acutely the lost days. I only have three more weeks of calm in which to get my life in order, get my summer deals done and get back to my everyday life somehow rested and recuperated.
And yet… .
Well, there is still time for one lost hour and one lost day. There is still time to stop keeping time. At least for a little while. There is time to spend an afternoon painting or a morning reading or an evening watching a movie. There is time to let go just the tiniest bit and let life happen.
I know I need to learn this balance of letting go and sinking into life while still working just a little bit. I also know that it’s a mind game which I’m not very good at. But we have a few years before full retirement yet and I need to figure this out. Will I? That remains to be seen. But for at least one day this month, I want to let a single day simply go by without a care in the world.
The Yuppie Homesteader 