Life is Precious, Time is Scarce, Spend it Wisely

    This is how I felt in January.

Whatever the number of actual days, I experience January as exceptionally long. In addition to its length, this year we can add snowy, cold, dark and dreary, at least in our part of the world. Ugh.

While I busied myself with activities, snow sports, and slowly working on chapters for a book, I also spent time deeply engaged in reading.

I've been reading Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal, a book I'd say is a must read for almost anyone over the age of 21 who plans to age, who has aging family members or who is human. His is my favorite type of book for it stimulated all kinds of questions and 
thoughts and ideas and caused me to research similar material and to read and reread 
important pieces.

One such piece was Ezekiel Emanuel's essay, "Why I hope to Die at 75," from a 2014 issue of The Atlantic. This I followed with Paul Kalanithi's  2014 essay, "How Long Have I Got Left?" published in The New York Times  and then his wife's, Lucy Kalanithi, 2016 essay, "My Marriage Didn't End When I Became a Widow" also in The NY Times. I finished off this series with Arthur Brooks' 2016 NY Times essay, "To Be Happier, Start Thinking More About Your Death."

Hmmm. Do you notice a pattern? I'm certainly thinking lots about the end of life for these works thematically hang together in their exploration of death or as I see it, the idea of living fully with the time you have.

Physicians penned three of the pieces and an ultra conservative, Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the fourth.
Normally, I'm far left of aligning with Brooks and the AEI, but I was intrigued enough by the essay's title to give it a quick read and found value in a few of his ideas.

 Probably too often I've written here about making good use of one's active, Go-Go Years, living with urgency in retirement (Hearn's idea), postponing nothing, living now, and acknowledging that life is finite.

In his essay, Brooks cites a Buddhist monk practice of meditating on photos of decaying corpses as a way of increasing awareness that the physical self, thus life, is temporary, fleeting. The practice's purpose is to assist the individual in focusing on the present, on what is important, to live better in the moment and to realign one's values with allocation of time.  Brooks argues that most people are misaligned, spending time on low value activities (surfing the Internet, viewing tedious television programs) that are not in harmony with their stated values. Misalignment, Brooks thinks results from an "error in decision making," leads to a life of boredom, tedium, and regret.

The solution to wasting time? It is here that I find myself aligned with Brooks' thinking, especially after reading Being Mortal and "How Long Have a I Got Left?" He proposes that consciously contemplating that life is precious and time is scarce as the solution, as in the Buddhist monks' practice. In other words, to live mindfully, with the full awareness that life is momentary can help one realign values.
How does one put such mindfulness into practice?
Brooks proposes that we live a year as though it were our last, living consciously and intentionally. Many others have suggested this strategy. In 1997 Stephen Levine published the book, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if it Were Your Last.

To some this might sound bleak, but not to me. Squandering precious time and denying reality, that sounds bleak. Being clear and intentional about life sounds ....optimistic.
As I finish reading Being Mortal, nudging my husband to read it too, I've already selected my next book, Paul Kalanithi's When Breathe Becomes Air. 
My overarching goal for 2016 is to live this year as if it were my last. For this task, I have found some excellent guides.

    Time for some adventures.

     Stay calm and travel.

Retirement Journey So Far Part 1: How'd I Do in the First Six and a Half Months?

About 15 months ago, we set off from Chicago on our initial journey into this next life-phase. R was fully retired and I was planning to live a mid-life gap year of fun and adventure. This journey included relocating to the Western part of the U.S., buying a little cottage in Bend, OR., and lots of planned travel varying in levels of adventure.

We've been living in our Bend house now for six and a half months so I'm over due for my six month check in -- to see how retired life is working for me, since I consider these six and a half months my initial retirement. As email-luck would have it, my friends at Vanguard recently sent me the article 5 Things to Think About on Your Journey to Retirement.  Perfect, I thought, I'm in the mood to think and analyze. More than half the article focused on planning basics --  when to start saving, figuring out your savings needs, calculating retirement expenses. Important stuff but not the focus of my six month evaluation. The last section grew more interesting with questions like What's your vision for the (retirement) future? Now we are talking, I thought -- let's start exploring how we want to live our lives. My interest built as I anticipated that the article's last section would help me assess and clarify how my own journey was moving along.

The final section opened with You're living life as a retiree -- finally! Is there anything about your lifestyle that hasn't met your expectations?

Great question, I thought as I read on. I'm ready to think about this.

"About five years after you retire, consider asking yourself whether or not retirement is what you thought it would be...."

Wait! What the f...? Five years? Wait five years to ask this question? Are they nuts?
Suddenly, my friends at Vanguard were not such good friends. Or at least not bright friends. They seemed to be ignoring one of the enormous realities of life -- that unforeseen events happen that can quickly change one's plans -- while at the same time suggesting that one diddle away a fair amount of precious time before evaluating how life is going. From my perspective, this is a big problem.

Let me explain.

As a psychotherapist, I'm a believer in development and developmental phases (infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, etc.) in that life can be roughly and flexibly broken into stages, with attending tasks or events associated with each phase. This idea applies to retirement. Michael Stein, CFP, is often attributed with (though others may have espoused this) the idea that for most people living in retirement follows three separate age related stages -- The Go-Go Years, The Slow-Go Years, and The No-Go Years.  The related ages for each stage are somewhat loosely configured as 

Go-Go Years --ages 55 (or 60 or 65) to mid-70s. These are presumably one's most active and healthy years, when one has lots of get up and go.

Slow-Go Years -- roughly mid- 70s to 85 when for many dashing through retirement 
seems less appealing and health and general aging cause them to slow down.

The No-Go Years -- 85 to ........ when retirees just don't go much. These are more the 
rocking chair on the porch years. Ok I know what some of you are thinking -- you've heard 
stories of people in their 90s running marathons or cycling in the Senior Tour de France, or climbing the Himalayas but those folks are likely exceptions. I've also heard people anticipate their own life expectancies in retirement based on their parents. Some describe how long a parent, an aunt or uncle lived rather than how well they lived in retirement. Quality of life. My own father died at age 84 but I don't think anyone, including him, thought his last six to eight years were his best and most active.

Others never live to see retirement. My mother died at age 55 well before she could retire. I've known plenty of others who died in their mid to late 50s or early 60s never knowing retirement's pleasures. To my way of thinking, arriving at the Go-Go Years is a privilege, probably a gift and one not to waste.

Let's go back to Vanguard's idea that after five years in retirement one evaluate how retirement is progressing. Let's say Ms. Susie B., an attorney, retired at age 65 and following Vanguard's model decided at age 70 to assess her retirement satisfaction. I'm no numbers genius, but seems to me that would give her only five more of the precious Go-Go Years to adjust her course and more fully live her retirement vision. That's not much time, especially after a lifetime of work.

My advice, which is not about finances, is to spend the five years prior to retiring coming to know yourself, figuring out what you want from this phase, and creating your vision of how you want to spend those precious Go-Go Years, knowing that your ideas, wants, needs will probably change and evolve once you live in that phase. And then six months or so into retirement living (not five years!), evaluate your progress so you can adjust if needed to make the most of the 
active, healthy, Go-Go Years.  And periodically, keep assessing your life. You never get 
back any of this time.  Don't waste it.

Next post -- Assessing My Initial Go-Go Years.

Hiking on Orcas Island, WA