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.

Stories Do Not Age

One thing about being retired is that I finally make time to visit people I should have been visiting all along but thought I was too busy to visit.  And when I visit with people I have not seen in a long time the telling of stories always breaks out.

Recently, a road trip took us through Oklahoma City.  While there we took the opportunity to visit with an aunt that lives in an assisted living facility.   We visited during the time during the day when the residents meet in the activity room for coffee and donuts.  It was a happy time visiting her and others that live there. They love to have company and pretty much talk the whole time - between bites of donuts. They tell stories of long ago and then start over again with the same stories.

I just finished reading a book called  The Rent Collector.  There is a passage in that book where the author is reporting conversation between a teacher and her pupil.  The teacher is trying to teach her student the reason literature is so important to us and the teacher says, "Almost everything around us in life gets old and wears out; stories, like our very souls don't age."  Literature is important because it is full of stories and stories do not age.

Just as stories are so important when we get together with someone we haven't seen in a while, they are important other times as well.  Since the recent visit with my aunt I have been thinking about how important stories are to being successful in retirement or any stage of life:   stories we have lived, stories we have heard, stories we have read, stories we have dreamed, stories we have written.  Because as we remember the stories we already know, we realize that any stage of life well lived allows us to create a whole new set of stories.  Stories that will not age, even though we do.

 The Rent Collector, page 178

Copyright 2012 by Camron Wright

Published by Shadow Mountain Publishing

Shadowmountain.com

Published in paperbound 2013

Be the Best Post _fill in the blank_ Ever

The Best Post-Prince Ever

A few months ago CNN reported that "In a remarkable press conference marked by grace and devoid of self-pity, former President Jimmy Carter said that four spots of cancer had spread to his brain."  Mr. Carter is a Democrat and was the 39th president of the United States. Then, sometime over the holidays I heard a friend of mine who I know to be a conservative Republican say, "Isn't it a shame about Jimmy Carter."   Even though she did not agree with all of what Mr. Carter had done during his time as president, she was empathizing with his situation.  She then said something that I thought was very interesting.  She said that she believed he had been the best "post-president" ever.  I interpreted what she said as meaning he had been the best retired president.

Agreeing with what she said, another person in the room recounted that  she had once worked on a Habitat For Humanity project with President Carter and Rosalind, and how it surprised her when she was working inside one of the houses being built she looked out an unfinished window hole in the wall and realized that Rosalind was working just on the other side of the wall from her. 

Have you noticed how the ex-presidents of our country when they retire from that very stressful office seem to follow very diverse paths in retirement.  They seem to follow their individual interest and passions in life.  Some have worked on charitable endeavors.  Some have gone back to their previous occupations such as farming.  Some play golf.  Some even stay involved in politics.  John Quincy Adams actually was elected to nine terms in the U.S. House of Representative after he retired as president, and used that platform to fight slavery.

Thinking about the "post-president" thing I began to consider that retirement is the perfect chance to be the best "post something".  We have not all been president, but we have all been several things that we will not be again after retirement.  To be the best post-whatever we were before retirement will require that we follow our interests and passions in retirement and give something new our best.

A Really Good Place To Start

You Are Here

In my life since retirement I have found myself in a lot of highway rest areas.  And on some of my more ambitious days I have also found myself at a trail head for a hiking or walking trail.  A common object at both of these places is a map on which is marked a location on the map called 'You are here.”  On the map are shown possible roads or paths to take from that marked location. 

To plot a course of any kind a person must know where you will start from.  When a person retires he will find himself somewhere.  It may not be where he planned to be at retirement or it may be exactly where he thought he would be.

He may wish he could start retirement from somewhere else.  He would like to be in a different position financially, or living in a different locale, or in a different family situation, or, or, or......  But he is where he is.  He is at the "you are here" arrow on the retirement trail head map, so he must make the most of his retirement years starting from that point.

The Apostle Paul once said in a letter he wrote to some friends that he had learned to be content no matter what his circumstances were.  When he wrote that, his circumstances were not what he would have chosen for himself; but they were the circumstances he was in.  What he had learned is a hard thing to learn, and it can only be really learned by experiencing unpleasant circumstances.  But learning this concept and training ourselves in response to it is a really good start on the future whether in retirement or some other stage of life.  Our circumstances, good or not, are what they are. 

I am writing this during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas and pausing to think what I am thankful for.  Some of my thoughts are as follows:

• My circumstances include much to be thankful for.
• Being thankful whatever the circumstances makes being content much easier.
• Being content is a really good place to start in making the most of my retirement years.

At the End of the Day

Overlooking a lake just north of Houston

Some time ago I stepped out of the RV right after sundown.  It wasn't dark yet, but it was trending in that direction.  We were camped overlooking a lake just north of Houston.

A few months later I stepped out of the RV right after sundown again.  We were camped this time in a small west Texas town in a campground right on the main highway through town.  Across the highway were the typical small town businesses and the obligatory Mexican restaurant, some of which had lighted signs.  The front of the campground was bordered along the highway with a white rail fence with a marker light atop every second post.

My thought pattern was the same both times after stepping out into the early evening.

At that particular time of day, I noticed that the light conditions seemed to make my vision a little clearer.  At least I noticed things I had not noticed in the brighter light of day.  There was no glare from a sun angle.   I could see lights at a great distance.  (If you click on the picture above to enlarge it on your screen you will see those lights.)  The ambient light level was low enough so that the lights stood out in my vision, but there was still enough light to see things that were unlighted.  But this balance only lasted for a short time and then the cycle of time moved on and darkness overtook.

I began to think about how this could correlate with my life and retirement.  For most of us retirement comes at the end of one life stage and the beginning of another.  For me the analogy could be that it comes toward the sundown of my work/life day.  As we retire we may begin to notice things we never noticed before.  There are several things that might work in our favor to make that happen.

First of all we should be a little wiser than we were earlier in life.  If we are not then shame on us.  With all of the experiences we have had in our lives, we should be.

Second, the fact that we have retired should have removed a lot of the "glare" caused by things in our everyday lives of the past.  That "glare" was probably caused by the hectic schedules and stress of our jobs, raising a family, and all of the other things involved in life before retirement.

There is probably an opportunity here.  If what I am thinking is true, the question becomes, “How should I take advantage of this opportunity to notice things I have never noticed before?”  Trying to answer that question is one of the reasons I am writing this blog.  With each post I answer a small bit of that question for myself.  I hope as you read each post you enjoy following my quest.

It's All Just Stuff

Kitchen, Dining Room, and Living Room in the RV.
  This picture was taken while setting up dinner seating for ten one cold January day.
Happy times!

When I retired and began to explore what I needed to be happy in retirement I began to look differently at all the stuff I had accumulated during my “career” life.  All of a sudden I was no longer in a collecting mode, but in a utilizing mode.  And I realized that to be happy I really did not need to utilize nearly all I had collected.

At retirement, my wife and I decided to become RV'ers.  We are not “full-timers” like some of our friends because we still have a home base house.  We are more what could be referred to as “anytimers”.  But when we are on the road it has pleasantly suprised me how happy we are in the approximately 300 square feet of space we have in our fifth wheel RV.  And I am not talking about being in the 300 square feet just for a weekend.  Sometime we travel for weeks at a time.  If it doesn't fit in that space we really do not seem to need it to be happy.  But what about all the other stuff we have collected in the other forty many years (actually we are closer to fifty years than to forty) of our marriage?  It turns out it is just stuff.

All of that stuff seemed like essential stuff at one time, and it may have been, but it is certainly no longer essential for our day to day happiness.  We are not ready to get rid of it, but we don't have to have it to be happy.

Let me illustrate with an entry dated October 5 from a diary kept on a trip that began on September 1 of last year –

“We started this trip with a freezer full of food prepared at home: soups, casseroles, etc.  We are now down to a chicken casserole, taco meat and a one pound package of hamburger meat. Tonight was jambalaya - so good on a cold night! We have also been using an RV size refrigerator. Have done fine with it. Makes you wonder why we feel we need a huge one at home…. “

These diary entry thoughts were recorded  while happily sitting in a recliner in the RV that evening watching "Xtreme RV's" on HGTV!

Baggage

The Author With Baggage

I mentioned in a previous post (“Close or Close?”) that on a visit to Utopia in the Texas Hill Country I picked up a book by a local author.  While reading that book it became obvious to me that there are a lot of life lessons that could be learned from people around Utopia if a person just paid attention.  But I guess that could be said of the people around almost anywhere.  I was back in Utopia recently and while there I remembered a quote recorded in that same book.  The quote was from the same lady I referenced in the previous post.  She had lived a long life in the canyon and during that time had ranched, operated a general store, and had managed rent houses.  She had been married a couple of times and she had raised children.  She had done a lot.  She described her life for which she had no regrets about how it had turned out, by saying, "Some things I shore wish never happened did, and some things I wish happened never did." *

Most of us do not really want to have an interesting story.  We do not want to be the testimony of a life gone bad and then retrieved from the fire.  We would just rather miss that life gone bad part.  But as we look back we can all think of times when things did not go the way we wish they had.  One exciting thing about retirement is that it usually happens at an age where we can look back with some pride that we have lived our story and learned some things from it.  Before retirement we have probably entered a lot of life's tunnels and have made it out the other end.

Because of that, no one gets to retirement without some baggage left over from our life journey.  And sometimes that baggage is pretty heavy.

I was fortunate to be able to do quite a bit of traveling during my life before retirement and I always had baggage with me when I went.  As I think about the baggage left over from life's journey and the baggage I carried with me on my traveling journeys I figure there must be some logical similarities to connect the two types of baggage.

The most obvious thing is that they are both heavy and cumbersome to handle.  Sometimes when I traveled, the most tiring part of the travel was handling the baggage.  Loading and unloading.  Packing and unpacking.  Deciding what to bring and what not to bring.  Asking myself, “Why did I bring that with me?  Will I really need that?”

A less obvious similarity between the two types are baggage are that they are both necessary and useful on the journey we are taking.  Of course that is true of the suitcases of clothes, toiletries, and other items I took with me on trips.  Without those I could not have gone the places I went and done the things I did while I traveled.  But what about the “baggage” we pick up as we go through life's journey?

It seems to me that that baggage is necessary and useful too.  Without it I could not have gone the places I went in life and done the things I did.  When someone says they have a lot of baggage in their life they usually mean they have suffered experiences that weigh heavily on them.  It is a fact that all baggage is heavy when carried.  But in my life even the bad experiences (baggage), especially the bad experiences (baggage) have been learning opportunities that help me make the most of retirement.

* Walton, Greg. Bear Meat 'N' Honey - An Oral History of the Sabinal Canyon. Vol. 1. Austin: Acorn, 1990. 30. Print.  Used by permission.