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.

Time and Adventure

    Before you cross the street take my hand.

    Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

I was at funeral recently and one of the speakers read a passage from Ecclesiastes 3.  You know the one that goes,

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

·         a time to be born and a time to die,

·         a time to plant and a time to uproot,

·         a time to kill and a time to heal,

·         a time to tear down and a time to build,

·         a time to weep and a time to laugh,

·         a time to mourn and a time to dance,

·         a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

·         a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

·         a time to search and a time to give up,

·         a time to keep and a time to throw away,

·         a time to tear and a time to mend,

·         a time to be silent and a time to speak,

·         a time to love and a time to hate,

·         a time for war and a time for peace.”

After the speaker read those words, he said, “But we do not really get to choose the times.”  

The speaker was getting ready to make a point about the person whose life we were celebrating at the funeral, but my mind wandered and I began to think how right that concept was.  Then my thoughts went to something I had heard many times in my life -- “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” 

This saying was attributed to famous cartoonist Allen Saunders in an article published by Reader’s Digest in January 1957 in a section called “Quotable Quotes.” 

Later, John Lennon composed a song containing a version of this thought and released it in 1980. I believe the song was called “Beautiful Boy”.  Mr. Lennon wrote these lyrics about his experiences with his son Sean. 

"Before you cross the street take my hand.  Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans."

We busily go about making plans that go somewhat like:  I am going to do this soon, then I am going to do that later, then I will move on to something else even later on.   These are good plans, but in real life things tend to proceed differently.  The trouble is most of us don’t realize this except in retrospect and then life has already happened.  

The person whose funeral I was at died an unexpected and untimely death.  I estimate that there were 1600 to 1800 people at the funeral.  Each of us considered ourselves one of his 10,000 closest friends.  But none of us chose this time to mourn which was brought on by his death.  It happened while we were making other plans.

Sometimes things in our lives go per plan, but more often than not they do not.  It is highly likely that life will push us toward an outcome different than what we planned.  Maybe that is what makes life an adventure, even in retirement.

Photographs

A Picture of Someone Taking a Picture of Someone

If you are like me you have or had a list of things you planned to do after retirement.  Maybe it was a list you made for yourself.  Or maybe it was a list your spouse made for you.  Or maybe it was a list of things you kept putting off with the excuse that you just did not have time before retirement.    I actually had two lists.  One list had what I thought would be big exciting trips I wanted to take or things I wanted to experience.  I called that my "bucket list."  The other list was that list of things that I wanted to get done, but just seemed like there was never enough time to do.  I didn't really have a name for that list.

I will have to say that I have made much better progress on the "bucket list" than I have on the other list.  Probably because the "bucket list" items seem like they would be more fun to actually do.

One of the things on that other list was to sort and organize all the photos, slides and movies I have taken over the past half century plus.  They have been just collecting and collecting and collecting and it seemed like a reasonable goal to make some order and sense of them.  I mean I have pictures taken on four continents of thousands of people, places and subjects that have been important at one time in my life or another so certainly they must need to be organized.

As I have begun this task several times over the past four years I have learned a few things that will have an effect on the way I proceed in the future.

Lesson 1:  It will probably take longer than my remaining lifetime to complete the project.  Because of this, I am not going to get in a hurry.  A project that is impossible to achieve in a remaining lifetime should not have a deadline.

Lesson 2:  The changes in technology over the past half a century make the task very difficult to do.  If you don't believe me try doing something with a Super 8 movie reel or a 110 size slide transparency (yes I have a lot of each of those).  Remarkably, even with all of the technological "advances" in photography, printed images on paper still seem to be the most permanent and usable images.  There is a corollary to this lesson -- Any advantages technological advances offer a project such as this are offset by the difficulties technological advances cause.

Lesson 3:  As I sort through the piles I am constantly drawn to the photographs that include people.  The pictures of scenery or other subjects are nice, but it is really the pictures that show the people that have a lasting appeal.  The people are really where the memories are.  I am going to enjoy the memories of the people I find in the pictures as I sort and organize.

Lesson 4:  I have way too many photos.  I believe many of them are quite good, but a huge number are certainly not.  As you can see by the photo at the beginning of this blog-post, I even have photos of people taking photos of other people.  I should have progressively fewer photographs as I sort and organize. And I will try to try to find some really good shots to illustrate these blog-posts as I go.

Lesson 5:  There are not enough tags and folder names to allow sorting and organizing a lifetime of memories.  Enough said!

As you probably suspect, I have made much better progress organizing these lessons learned than I have actually organizing my photographs.

*Oh, by the way, I just found my old Super 8 movie projector and my old Bell and Howell Slide Cube projector in my garage.  I wonder if I can still find bulbs to fit them.  Maybe so, maybe not.  Everything seems to be going to LEDs and CFLs these days.

Close or Close?

Inside the Lost Maples Cafe -- Utopia, Texas

Since retiring we have visited the Texas Hill Country on many occasions.  It is one of our favorite areas to visit.  During one of those visits we were on a scenic drive one day and found ourselves in the town of Utopia.  Utopia is a small town located in the middle part of the Sabinal River canyon and was given a notoriety boost in the 2011 movie Seven Days in Utopia.  The movie starred Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, and Melissa Leo and presented the story of a young golfer trying to make his mark on the professional tour who finds himself unexpectedly stranded in Utopia for a week.  While he is there he learns a lot about life from the people living in and around Utopia.

Unlike the young golfer we were not stranded in Utopia. We were back, somewhere else, in our RV by nightfall.  But while in Utopia I picked up a book called Bear Meat 'N' Honey - An Oral History of the Sabinal Canyon by Greg Walton a local author.  After reading the 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.

The book is a series of interviews with several of the old time residents of the canyon around Utopia.  One person interviewed was a lady named Oma. She was 85 years old at the time of the interview and had lived in the canyon since the very early 1900's. Here is an excerpt from that interview presented in Oma's own words.

"The biggest change around here?  I know how I'd describe it.  People are different today.  People don't visit like they done in the old days.  People don't share in one another's lives.  I think they's just as good a people as before, but visiting is out.  Don't you think?  The biggest majority of people here now are retired and when they do go anywhere they go visit their children off somewhere or into San Antonia for shoppin'.  When I was a growin' up, well neighbors was almost like kin.  A lot of time, they was kin.  Didn't make no difference anyway.  If you needed help, why they'd help you out.  Time came why, you done the same for them.  Plant your crops, raise your barn, birth your babies, bury your dead.  Do plumb near anything for you.  They didn't just live close.  They was close." *

             

"They didn't just live close. They was close."  Wow!  That statement caught my attention when I read it.  Maybe it caught my attention because it seemed to be in hard contrast to the social media driven world we all seem to live in today.  Times are different now.  Sometimes we are so close together we can hardly move but we are still not close.  We have all read stories about someone in a crowded place being placed in real peril and instead of stepping in to help, the people around that person pulled out their cell phones to film the scene.

I have noticed a phenomenon that has developed over the past few decades that illustrates my thoughts about us being very close, but still not close.  First it started out with the convenience of being able to carry a phone with us and call anyone we wanted at anytime from anywhere.  Then email replaced written correspondence with flowing prose with instant but tepid communication.  Then texting replaced both email and talking on the phone.  An example of how this has affected our personal closeness was illustrated to me when my wife and I were traveling with my teenage granddaughter and one of her friends to the beach.  The two girls were in the backseat probably less than two feet apart and were texting to each other instead of talking.  Then one of them texted my wife in the front seat with a question.

Now I know that these girls were already close friends, but something seemed to be missing in the conversation that was ongoing during our drive to the beach.  Information was being shared, but I think what was missing may be what Oma referred to in the interview as "visiting."  I am thinking about this like a retired guy who did not live his life in the Sabinal Canyon, but who believes he can see wisdom in the recollections of Oma as they might apply to my world.

When I was employed before retirement I did things that were important to others (specifically my employers) because I was required to.  It was profitable for me to do so because I was paid to do it.  Since I am now retired I am free to do things that are important to others.  Not because I am required to do them; not because I am paid to do them; but because they are the right things to do.

If people are close it seems to be because they do things that are important to one another.  Not necessarily big things, but important things.  When people are close together but are not close it is because they are doing things that are important to themselves but not necessarily important to one another.  Now I am thinking that retirement is a prime time to get closer to the people I live close to.  At least maybe I now have more time and energy to do something other than just sending them a text message.

* Walton, Greg. Bear Meat 'N' Honey - An Oral History of the Sabinal Canyon. Vol. 1. Austin: Acorn, 1990. 28. Print.  Used by permission.

When To Retire

Talking about what they want to do when they grow up.

I have heard people say, "Well retirement isn't for everyone."  I don't know if I agree with that.  But I do know that retirement isn't for everyone right now.  Right now is not the right time for everyone.  It may be too early for some and too late for others.

If you are not retired do you have a preconceived notion as to when you should retire?  If you are retired did you have a plan as to when you would retire?  If so, on what did you base the when?

The other day I found myself reviewing something called the 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey which is published by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.  Now I know this survey would not interest everyone (maybe no one reading this blog), but for some reason I found myself spending some of my time on it.  I am retired after all.  

As I reviewed the survey I started thinking about when a person should retire.  One of the survey questions was, “Did you retire earlier than you planned, later than you planned, or about when you planned?”  In the results analysis of the survey there is a chart that summarizes the answers to that question.  When I looked at the chart it was very interesting to me that in 2014 only about 38 percent answered that they 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.  But all who answered this question were retired.

I know people who retired before they planned to because of health reasons or disability.  I also know a lot of people who retired early in the years since 2008 because the economy went off the rails and required a change in their life structure.  In fact the survey found that only about a quarter of the people surveyed who retired before they planned to report doing so because they could afford to do so.

*Former President Eisenhower once told this story, “When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States.  Neither of us got our wish."

Remembering this story seemed to go right along with my thoughts about retirement.  When to retire is like most of what we plan in life.  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.  But 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.


*Quoted in Baseball's Greatest Quotes (1992) by Paul Dickson; cited in "Game Day in the Majors" at the Library of Congress