Abandonment

Today is the day for abandonment.  Today is the day for abandoning the desires arising from sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch.  Today is the day for abandoning the demands of the mind.

One's 60s can be the best time in your life.  It's an age when the career burdens of one's 40s and 50s have been left behind, but the shutdown and illness of one's 70s and 80s have not yet arrived.  It is a time to enjoy life on your own terms. When I retired in July 2019 at age 65 and entered Chapter Three of my life, my second childhood really began.

Sixty is the new ten.

All too often, people work at their jobs until they're physically unable to work any longer, but that leaves them spent and exhausted with nothing left to physically enjoy their retirement years.  At age 65, I recognized that I was on that path and left, even though I wasn't in the best financial shape to make the move to retirement.

I understand that for all too many people, retirement isn't even an option.  Working from paycheck to paycheck, without enough money invested in Social Security, with mounting financial pressures to provide and care for their families, they simply can't afford to enjoy their golden years.  This is one of the many problems facing our modern society, and one we should and must fix.

But I was lucky.  Two years ago, I saw two paths in front of me and was in a position to be able to pick and choose which path to take.  One path was a timely retirement - a path not without some economic risks, but a path I could still tentatively take.  The other path was continuing to grind my life away in a job I no longer enjoyed, working for a company I didn't like and that didn't particularly like me, until a heart attack or stroke intervened and forced me to live out the rest of my life in recovery.  The former was obviously better than the latter, and I don't regret my decision.

I arrived at that crossroad in July 2019, before anybody knew about the coming pandemic, and I certainly didn't take the isolation and lockdown of the covids into my retirement plans.  C'est la vie.  I wouldn't have changed my plans even if I had somehow known.  In fact, I was better off in retirement, as I didn't have to make hard choices about returning to the workplace versus staying home to protect my health.  Staying home was my default mode.  

It doesn't matter if I sleep until 10:00 a.m.  It doesn't matter if I spend the day reading comic books and novels, or playing a video game, or watching CSPAN.  It doesn't matter if I go to bed at midnight, or 2:00 a.m., or at all.

Letting go of Puritan work ethics and societal guilt trips over being "productive," it's time for a child-like return to simply enjoying each day as it is, regardless of the consequences.

Now excuse me, I have nothing to do.