Retirement is Child’s Play

Me thinking about retirement...

Kicking and screaming, I retired. Well, I didn’t kick too hard. I was jet lagged and tired. I felt like an old clock that was running down. But my whole being was still hooked into being a pilot. It took forever to unplug. Every bit of self-importance and identity was orbiting around that “pilot” center. I didn’t realize it, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be that way, but I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t flying.

Six years later, I think I know. I’m the same person I always was, but better. I’m more relaxed, happier – just okay being me. You don’t like me? That used to be a bad thing. Now I realize, finally, that trying to get people to like me is nuts. What is even more nuts is trying to get people to like me when I don’t like them. As a copilot, I used to try so hard. Why didn’t I just fly the airplane and let it go? Why did I care so much about what they thought? Because I was a people pleaser to the max. Sad but true.

Why do we grow being people pleasers?

I love people, and I love doing what I can for them, but I know I can’t live their lives for them or fix them. I want to be the tool box: I’m glad to share my tools, but I don’t want to be their carpenter. They’ll have to build their own house…I just don’t think it helps to help too much.

I’m not angry that so much money is going to welfare or inner cities or any of the causes that seem so good. I’m just sorry that it doesn’t help. Giving and giving and giving until you have nothing doesn’t work. I wish it did. But I think the best way to teach others is to show them. Just live life the best you know how, and hope people want to emulate you.

So many kids nowadays are not surrounded by happy adults. The people around them are just getting by – just getting through the day and their life. How can you be excited about growing up and going into the world if it doesn’t look like anyone is enjoying their life? Why do kids dream about being athletes and movie stars? Because those people look like they are having fun! Look like is the key phrase here, and that discourages kids even more, because if those who “have it all” aren’t living great lives, how can they?

Kids should be excited about growing up.

I’m not trying to oversimplify or be a Pollyanna, but I don’t know how else to put it. Enjoy your life. Wake up every morning and spend a few minutes looking at the ceiling and thinking about the day. I ask God to help me be the best I can be: loving, kind, full of integrity, caring, grateful. I honestly don’t think most of us can live our best lives without asking and listening for guidance.

We human beings are reactive. We don’t, for the most part, live from “the inside out” as Christina Sestan says. http://www.citruscoaching.com/ But we would be happier if we did.

I don’t get up in the morning and watch the news. I can’t handle all the suffering in the world before breakfast. Hell, I can’t even handle it after a bottle of wine with friends. It is too much to know all the sorrow and trouble in the world. I don’t care if someone in North Carolina just got murdered. Wrong, I do care: I care too much and that is the problem, but I live in Oregon. To quote John Mayer, it’s not that I don’t care – it’s just that the fight ain’t fair.

It is too overwhelming, too all-consuming, for me to think about the tsunami in Asia, the nuclear melt-down in Japan, our government’s huge debt, the lives lost in an airliner crash. My inner psyche gets overloaded – it’s all too big, depression sets in, and nothing gets handled. None of us have the capacity or the knowledge to handle so much sadness and chaos. My niece used to come home crying because her biology teacher told them about all the animals going extinct and how the world was falling apart.

Do we need to know about every problem in the world?

Really? Seriously? What is going on in our schools today? How are we teaching our kids to cope? Maybe we aren’t. I’m not sure we are even teaching logic any more, but if you don’t learn to think logically, you can never think anything through. You can never put anything in perspective because you can’t reason through it.

So, if you want to wake up every day and enjoy your life, you better decide what you are going to let in. Neighbors who gossip and are negative do not share morning coffee with me. But sometimes they sneak in my back door or into my head and I can’t get rid of them.

When did people get so judgmental and cruel? Oh, I guess they always have been…thinking about Nellie Olson and her mom on Little House on the Prairie.

No one deserves the cruel gossip that I keep hearing. No one.

So how do we fight the negativity, the meanness? Because I want to go to bed every night with a heart full of love and kindness. I like to think that, if my dad and grandpa are up in heaven watching, they’ll be proud of how I turned out. I want to live the virtues they taught me: integrity and kindness, love and thoughtfulness.

When I hear people badmouthing others it just makes me sad. I want to cry for them. I want to have compassion and try to understand where they are coming from. Instead I get angry. How can they be so cruel – so mean? I want to run far and fast before I get dragged down into the muck and mire with them.

I want to live consciously, caring for others. I want to be compassionate, feeling empathy, not judgment.  It is so easy to forget how much our words can cut and hurt another person who does not deserve our cruelty. I know that I am accountable for my thoughts and actions.

It is easy to hurt people we love without meaning to.

I See What Eye See

Staying young..that's the key!

I don’t think I will ever be someone who is bored in retirement. As long as I can keep learning, I hope and pray I can stay young mentally.

I still love to fly.

I still love to fly. I know airports are more of a hassle and I know people say it isn’t as fun as it used to be. But I still love to travel. There is so much to see in this world.

I love to learn by taking photography classes, cooking classes, writing classes, nutritional classes and art classes.

Taking cooking classes across the river at Maryhill Winery

I never want to be the know-it-all who tells everyone one else what to do and how to do it…the one who judges everyone else and has all the answers.

I'm not afraid of alligators. Well, maybe just a little... at least a healthy respect.

People who have to be right are probably just insecure and scared. But they are hard to be around because they project their fears. It’s hard to be happy if you are afraid, I fear.

Don't be afraid of life.

The older I get, the less I have figured out. Or is it the wiser I get, the less I know? Everything from politics to religion – the unmentionables, to new ideas and a changing world: I don’t want to be the one talking about how much I miss the good old days or how this world is going down the tubes.

Too often if I take a hard-line stance on something I turn out to be wrong. For me, the key is staying open-minded, listening, and considering viewpoints counter to my own. I want to keep trying to understand: Why do they do that? Why do they think that? Why do they believe that way? What am I missing?

It’s the old Indian “walk in my moccasins” cliché, but it’s true. Different cultures, upbringings, and experiences create completely different ways of thinking and doing. It’s not black and white or right and wrong. It’s shades of gray, with lots of middle ground.

I could stay in one place, do the same thing, and enjoy my life just as much. But meeting new people with new ideas stimulates me. Observing and questioning the world around me, I grow and change. Then I go home happier and, hopefully, more interesting and positive to be around.