A Useful Word In Retirement

I know this is going to sound strange, but I have read several articles recently about a single Danish word.  This word was voted the favorite word in Denmark in a contest ending in September of last year, and that is what seems to have attracted the attention of copy writers who are desperate to find a subject to write about so they can meet a deadline.  The word is "pyt" (pronounced like pid in Denmark).  The word seems to have caught the eye of a relatively large group of writers and a few readers like myself.

The contest to determine the favorite word was conducted by the Danish Library Association, and the public was invited to vote on their favorite.  I first saw this word when I was reading about the happiness level of the Danish population when compared with populations in other parts of the world.  Denmark seems to always rank among the happiest two or three countries of the world when surveys are conducted.  It recently ranked second behind Finland on the United Nations 2019 Happiest Countries Index. A big part of the reason may be this little word -- "pyt".  As a matter of reference, the United States ranked nineteenth on the same index.

Some Danish to English translation dictionaries indicate that "pyt" = "puddle", but this seems to be an oversimplification.

There is no word for word English translation for this word.  English speakers have to use a couple of sentences to describe the meaning.  Here is one of the attempts I found on the internet:   ‘Pyt’ is used to express that you accept a situation is out of your control, and even though you might be annoyed or frustrated, you decide not to waste unnecessary energy on thinking more about it. You accept it and move on.

Is there a connection with this word being the favorite word and the overall happiness level of the Danish population?  Maybe we need a word like this in English.  Then we could use it when something out of our control goes bad, instead of the (four letter) words we typically use that indicate things like anger or total disgust.  Perhaps we Americans would be as generally happy as the Danes if we wasted less energy thinking about annoying or frustrating things that are out of our control.

Since my blog is about the thoughts of a retired guy,  I thought I might relate this to retirement.  Retirement is not a new life.  It is a stage of life. 

A lot of people get concerned about how to get ready for retirement.  Or what they will do in retirement.  Or when is the best time to retire.  It seems like more planning goes into retirement than for any other stage of life.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."  Another famous general, Colin Powell is quoted as saying, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

"Planning is indispensable, but plans are worthless,"  because life is what happens while we are making other plans.

No matter how much we plan, things not covered by the plan will happen.  Even if we do everything perfectly our lives will not be perfect.  Yes, even in retirement.  It does mean that the most important thing in a good retirement is not the planning for, but the living it to the fullest.  That is how we can be happiest.

This collection of essays are my thoughts as I try to do that.

One Day

One Day -- Looking Back

Several years ago, not long after I retired I was reading some Facebook posts and saw this thought in one of the posts:

“One day, you'll be just a memory for some people.  Do your best to be a good one.”

Retirement is a separate stage of life and will create memories of its own.  We create memories for ourselves, but more importantly we create memories for other people with what we do.

When I first saw the statement about trying to be a good memory I thought, "Wow that is perceptive!"  And I thought that trying to be a good memory would be a good retirement goal.  After I started publishing this blog I even wrote a blog post about those thoughts, but I never was satisfied with what I wrote so I never posted it.  It is probably a good thing because over time I have changed my opinion and I now think that doing my best to be a good memory would not be a good goal in retirement.  

This morning I received an email that made me remember the thought above so I thought I would attempt a rewrite.  This blog post is the attempted rewrite.

The email was from one of my very good friends letting us know that his mother had passed away in the wee hours of the morning.  This great lady will now be just a memory for some people, and I know from previous conversations with my friend that she will be a good one; but not because she tried to be a good one.

Funerals are largely times for remembering people.  They are times for remembering the person who has passed, but they are also times for remember those who are left behind and how our lives have mingled with one another.  I have heard people at funerals remember that someone did something because that is just who they were, or because they really had a passion for something, or because they just had a love of life or of all of the people around them.  But never once have I heard at a funeral anyone say, "He or she tried to be a good memory."

I now think our goal in retirement should be to live as who we are, live according to our passions, live according to who and what we love in life.  If we do that, the memories will take care of themselves. 

Fifty-third Best

One day this summer, while driving between Brainerd and Nisswa  in Minnesota, I read a billboard.  The billboard said something that caught my eye.  It was an advertisement for a resort in the area and said that the resort was rated fifty-third best in the world.  My first thought was, "Who cares."  But then I begin to consider that if no one cared then it wouldn't be on a billboard.  The people at the resort evidently care or they would not have spent the money to put it on a billboard. Then I wondered, "Why do they care?"

I think they care because fifty-third in the world is good.  It is not best, but it is good.  In fact when one considers the number of resorts in the world it is very good.  Something does not have to be the number one best to be very good.

After digging a little deeper I found that fifty third in the world means twenty-first in the U.S., and it means first in Minnesota.  Not too bad huh?

One of my earlier posts in this blog was titled "When To Retire" posted on April 16, 2015.  In that post I wrote about a survey that indicated only about 38 percent of persons who retired in 2014 retired about when they had planned to do so.  In fact, about half of all the survey respondents answered that they retired before they planned.  Then there was the group who retired later than they planned to or who had not given any thought to when they planned to retire. "Sometimes things in our lives go per plan, but more often than not they do not.   We may plan to retire early; we may plan to retire late; we may plan to retire at sixty-five; or we may plan to not retire at all.  It is highly likely that life may push us toward an outcome different than what we planned.  But, that does not mean that life is not good anyway."

I am thinking that when we retire, we don't have to be the best of anything to have a very good retirement.  We can be way down the list.  Maybe even 53rd, and still be very good.   According to their published information Madden's resort has been in business for over eighty-five years.  What if the owners had waited to open the resort until they had a plan that would insure they would be in the top ten resorts in the world, or even in the top fifty?   If they had waited, they would probably still not be open.  I am glad I did not wait until I was the best at something before I retired.