Notes on Retirement

Just a quick update regarding state of mind as we head into Week 4 of retirement:

• We can already feel ourselves changing, largely for the good.  A lot of anger is falling away, like leaves falling from a tree in the autumn.  We weren't happy with our job for the past five or so years and were subject to at least a dozen little micro-aggressions each week.  As a result, we were carrying around a lot of pent-up frustration and anger, which often expressed itself at inappropriate times (are there ever appropriate times?).  But now all that is receding into the past, and we can feel the anger leaving our body like one feels a fever break or a headache fade away.  

• We find ourselves living much more in the present, as the Zen masters would advise.  For once in our life, we're not putting something off until the weekend, or looking forward to the next holiday or the next vacation.  We're not planning for the next job or the next career position, and we're no longer anticipating a future retirement.  There's little reason that anything we want to do can't be done today, so we're not engaging in much long-term planning or day-dreaming about the future.  Here, now is all we need to attend to and we're not experiencing it as some sort of philosophical ideal but as a matter-of-fact reality of our daily life.

We spent a lot of time today moving furniture around the house and re-arranging rooms.  It seems the rest of our life is going to be played out in this pile of bricks on a hill, and the house is no longer just a place to store our possessions and for us to crash on weekends.  So we're realizing that a great place to read would be on the living room sofa, if only the lamp table from the den was there to provide light. We're realizing that the futon/settee in the guest room would make a great seat for relaxing in the study, and that the only reason our zafus and zabutons were in the study is because they had been displaced by the futon in the guest room.   So as there's no time like the present (since the only time is the present), we moved it all around today.  

It's surprising how heavy tatami mats are.  We were sweating after we had finally moved everything around (and vacuumed a shocking amount of accumulated cat hair from behind each piece of furniture) and needed a nap.  And with no more time constraints, there was no reason not to nap when we were through.

So the days pass by and we take care of things as and when needed.  That's a pretty Zen way of living, we think.