I suppose the wind in your hair doesn't really make sense in my case, but you still feel free!
Age is just a number. Life is what you make it. Remember you don't just live once - you live anew every day. Remember also - you only die once!
For many years my wonderful daughter tells everyone she has been living my dream - now it's my turn to take some of that time back and live my own. In a world where nature at it's purest is stunning and beautiful, where the clear starry night will speak to you if you let it, where there are so many tastes and cultures available, find your place and enjoy.
Retirement is nothing to fear if you have a vision and dream of what you want it to be. 45 years of working with the last 10-12 looking forward to retirement and then not enjoying it seems a waste of those final working years. All the previous years when you struggled through early mornings, late nights, traffic, trains, worried about finances, paying bills, family troubles and tribulations - that's not to say some of those will not be concerns in the future - now is the time to "take back control" (as the Brexiteers would say!).
So what next .......
Do you know where you are going?
Do you know what it will be like when you get there?
Why don't we simply call it an adventure .......
I started this towards the end of 2018 as I approached retirement thinking I would have a lot of time on my hands to scope it out and develop it as it went along, however now three and a half years later I am just getting back to looking at it and updating it. To say it's been a bit of a rollercoaster would be an understatement.
I had planned travel and trips and the experience of seeing new places and meeting new people, and I did, but it had it's own challenges. Let's see what actually happened in those 3 short years -
- 2019: After a series of extensions starting in March 2019 Brexit finally took place at the end of January 2020
- 2020: places like Wuhan and something called Covid became household names as a global pandemic swept the world. Things like lockdown and social distancing became the norm irrespective of where you were or what language you spoke.
- 2022: Russia started their "special military exercise" and invaded or attempted to invade Ukraine, just as the world was starting to get back to some new form of normal, creating mayhem in areas of fuel and food with spiraling increases in costs and fueling inflation.
Strangely though it hasn't been a boring or frustrating or travel free 3 years. It's not what life throws at you that determines your path, rather it's what you do with it that determines your path.