Post #3321: Summer retirement practice

Last night, the coyotes running down the road woke me up – barking and howling like the wild things they are. It’s okay to be woken up in the middle of the night when on vacation, I just sleep in more in the morning to make up the difference, and an afternoon nap is often also on the agenda in the hot summer days.

Brian and I left music camp in Sorrento on Sunday, driving directly south to our cabin via Yankee Flats, Glenemma, Fintry and a bunch of other unincorporated settlements along the way. We are now in Bankier, a train stop settlement on the old Kettle Valley Railway – where we will stay for the next few days before returning home. It’s pretty hot here, but the cabin stays cool and I have my heart set on an after-dinner swim tonight. We have unearthed the kayaks from our under-cabin storage box and an early-morning paddle is on my agenda for the morning. One thing about being in the mountains (the foothills of the Cascades really) is that the mornings are cool enough for activity, even when the rest of the day swelters.

We have owned this place with friends for about 12 years now, but since moving to Gabriola a decade ago we don’t get out here more than once or twice a year. I’m hoping that when I retire this fall (last day of work = October 20th) I will make better use of it. I have a mind to come up during the week sometimes when Brian is in the city – I can drop him off at work on my way to the interior and then pick him up again to return to the island by the weekend. We will see.

For sure we are coming up here again in the days after I retire, I have put it on the shared calendar that we will be here from Thursday to Sunday in anticipation of needing something to do in the immediate aftermath of my work identity being returned to my employer. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around that moment yet, and I don’t expect to until sometime after. All I know is that having a plan to keep busy those first few days is essential.

I did enroll in two courses for the fall start of my Theology program yesterday, and I expect that will help the transition as well. I’ll have about six weeks of overlap between the end of work and start of school, so that will be a bit hectic, but I will have something to transition into at least. People generally say you shouldn’t plan anything too big in the immediate aftermath of retirement, but I’m not planning to stop doing life just yet and I want to take advantage of the extra year and a half the early retirement initiative has bought me to get on with the rest of it.

Before I left work for my holiday, I told my team that they could practice me being retired since that’s what I am doing. Yesterday I took two walks, today I had a long nap after going to town on an errand, tomorrow I will kayak. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be retired – just deciding day by day what I want or need to do and doing it, without the external structure imposed onto my days. It doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything difficult, or that there won’t be chores in my life – but that I will suddenly have 40 hours per week with which to do other things, and I can schedule my life according to my actual biorhythms – working out in the morning before I eat breakfast, for example. Going for a walk after lunch. Sleeping as many hours as I need instead of forcing myself out of bed at 5 am no matter whether I’ve spent half the night awake. Just the amount of extra movement I will naturally get when I’m not at a desk all day long makes me giddy to think about.

I have a few more days of retirement practice before I go back to work and try to finish off some last projects. I have realized that as much as I feel the responsibility to get it all done – I won’t, and it doesn’t matter all that much anyway. I just need to put in three more months before I find out what it’s like to be on the other side of work, opening the door to whatever comes next.