A Rolling Stone

I’m officially Refreshed, aka “retired”!  I thought that today things would feel somehow radically different, like something had shifted in the universe. The biggest difference I noticed though was this. And it floored me that this hadn’t happened in more than 30 years on a weekday that wasn’t a vacation or sick day. I woke up when I woke up. No alarm. Because, as the night person you know me as, I naturally wake up around mid-morning. It was beyond glorious. But beyond that, I more or less feel the same as yesterday. Whatever evolution got me here started awhile ago, and either was completed or is still in process.  So today I thought it would be nice to share a thought bubble, which is this:

Move toward change.

It makes human sense to crave a status quo, for a certain amount of sameness signifies safety, maybe signified that we’ve made it. Instead of a nomadic existence, we can make camp, put up a permanent shelter, and stay.  And for many of the Baby Boomer generation, it made sense to value and take justifiable pride in a stable career built around commitment to longevity in a single trajectory, single institution even. And since the youngest Boomers were born around 1964, that means many individuals of this generation are still very much in the workforce, and with their seniority, these values are still pretty dominant.

And it’s equally human to crave newness. The sense of wonder at experiencing something different. The joy of discovery. The thrill of the unknown. I was amazed to realize what I’ve been feeling in this past year. It’s a feeling of open and limitless possibility that I have not felt since freshman year in college. Thumbing through a thick blue book of courses filled me with a “the world is your oyster” kind of thrill. Every single one of those courses was available to me according to my, well, you could call it a whim. Sadly, it seems that the passage to adulthood is learning to shun the nature of kids and teenagers to follow their curiosity, to trade it in for “responsibility” and “outcomes.”  Then, the more we avoid the range of change, the more we learn to fear it, and the path narrows by decisions of our own making. It makes me shudder, what we do to ourselves.

 So for me, being Refreshed isn’t mere freedom. It’s something more, it’s unlimited power, choice, awe.  But here’s the thing. I’d assumed it was retirement itself that would bring me these things, but I was wrong. I actually didn’t need retirement to fully re-enter an existence of awe. Rather, it was rediscovering awe that opened my personal path to Refreshment. And it’s within each of us to do it anywhere and anytime.