The Top Three Things On My Mind At 100 Days Out
3. Leadership Ramp Down
Even though I feel pretty much free of any attachment to legacy, still, old habits die hard. It’s been challenging, mostly because I haven’t thought of it until I came to this particular bridge, on what and how much to participate as old and continuing questions and issues present themselves. New issues and new business, that’s easy. But what about an ongoing challenge with significant impact on staff in the unit I direct, the solution for which we’ve been working on but still haven’t figured out? There are some decisions and strategies in which I will participate with the full weight of my leadership position until the day I retire, and others which I will partially or completely defer, I just don’t know yet which ones they will be. Having lived a life where future work extended indefinitely, proceeding through this rampdown been a rich experience in developing definitive boundaries that I wish I’d learned years ago.
2. Retirement paperwork and other logistics
I’m discovering that the amount of logistics and paperwork is just as extensive for offboarding as onboarding. Some of the pages and pages of paperwork includes weird stuff like having to track down my spouse’s birth certificate. Where do I even get a notary signature In order to get retirement health insurance, I have to do some other stuff, plus be aware of what needs to happen at the age we transition to Medicare (if it still exists in a viable way). I’ve never been more acutely aware of how yoked we are in the US to employment-based health insurance and how different all this would be with a national healthcare plan. I’m thinking about tax implications. About whether or not and how much to put into IRAs. And getting ready for the reality of the first month without a direct deposit.
1. Letting the nostalgia sink in
I’m really starting to feel all the feels in these borderlands between endings and beginnings. Years ago my mother taught me this Korean term that has no true English counterpart, “Jung,” which means experiencing the lack of something. At the time I think there was a mean girl who had moved away. Mom explained that there are two kinds of Jung, beautiful-Jung and ugly-Jung. It’s deep because missing what has been awesome is only half the equation of endings. It means that no matter what it is, once it’s no longer there, you feel the presence of its absence, like hearing silence once the music ends. Once you never have to deal with that toxic individual or go to that tedious meeting again, along with the relief and gladness, there is still a note of something there. And for the many magical things and magical friendships that have been nourishing and joyful and exhilarating, well, they will continue to be every bit as magical as ever.
