By Mary Kay DuChene.
Not quite a year ago, I wrote a newsletter article on transitions, as I began to think about my own transition into retirement. Like most people in ministry, going cold turkey, as “they” say, wasn’t in the cards for me. I held onto what I thought was a small portfolio of work. All these months later, I realize that was a good decision (I love my work, after all!). An emotional transition (see the aforementioned article), it’s a process to learn how to retire. And I tell myself that over and over again.
Being a year of transitions for me (I lost both my parents this year), I’ve been learning how to let go and shift perspective. No better place to do that than in therapy, which has been a Godsend – highly recommended. Having the “it’s a process” conversation over and over, I’ve worked on shifting perspective and shifting the very center of my life, flipping the priority from one that centers work to one that centers the most important things in my life – family and friends.
To be sure, some of my work in this year of transition has to do with the loss of both parents in a very short span of time. I’ve questioned who my siblings and I are together now that we don’t have the center-focus of our parents to hold us together. We’re working on that. Yet some of the transition work I’ve learned I need to do is the result of years and years of prioritizing work first, family second, leaving little time for a third priority: friends. I said to my therapist recently: “I’m not even sure how to be a good friend.” That, too, is a process. To be sure, even if someone could have whispered these things in my ear a year or two ago, I don’t think I could have prepared for it. This is part of the swampy neutral zone (see William Bridges model of transition), and it demands to be slogged through, on the way to a new beginning. I can see that new beginning in my mind. It has a face to the bright sun, breeze in my hair, life of leisure kind of feel.
When people ask how retirement is going, my response is generally, “I don’t feel retired.” A wise friend and colleague responded to that one day with “what did you think it would feel like?” Such a good question. I suppose the answer is I don’t know, but I’ll know it when I feel it. As long as I don’t feel it, I’m still in the process. Today, that process looks like paring down work even more, examining my relationships and deciding what they, and I, are needing and wanting, and reflecting on how to get more of this and less of that. Soon, I get to start having lunch monthly with a group of friends who are all retired, having said to them that I think I’d feel more retired if I did something leisurely and luxurious (picture a long lunch with nowhere to rush to after). In a flash they were all in, and I had taken one step closer to figuring out what retirement feels like (and prioritizing friends!). In truth, I know they have a lot to teach me about retirement too!
Two weeks ago, Mark Sundby, in his own retirement announcement, offered the Spanish word for retirement: jubilación. He shared with us the meaning of its Latin core: “to shout out joyfully.” One day, I will feel fully retired, and I will shout out joyfully to mark its occasion!
In whatever your days bring, work or retirement, may you be joyful and may you be well.
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