12 What About Retirement Activity?

Helen had dreamed her whole life of learning to play the cello. Helen loved the symphony specifically and music in general. Helen had played various musical instruments in grade school and a little bit more in college. But once she married, had children, and began her teaching career, Helen had not done much more with music. She didn’t have the time or energy, nor the financial resources or creative inspiration. So Helen simply continued to listen to music, while falling more and more in love with the cello. And then, retirement was suddenly upon her, when the one thing that she wanted to do for herself more than anything else was to play the cello.

Activity

Regularly engaging in enjoyable activity is huge to a good retirement. We don’t retire to sit on our hands and sofas, mourning the end of a work life. We instead retire to rest, relax, and enjoy a final active stage of life. Looking forward to retirement for that purpose can be a lot of what motivates and sustains you through the sometimes-arduous final stage of work life, when work can be harder than ever, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Activity in retirement can also motivate and sustain you through the challenges of retirement, whether those challenges involve decline, disability, or loss. Activity can also facilitate the exercise, mental stimulation, growth, exploration, creativity, studies, and social interaction that we need for a healthy retirement. When planning your retirement, give significant attention to the activities in which you would like to engage. Refine your retirement budget and choose your retirement location and lifestyle to support those activities. Don’t make retirement all about survival, about hanging on. Instead, make retirement about enjoying life through engaging, fun, and fruitful activities. 

Dreams

Some of us dream all our lives to do something specific and special, but the time is never right until retirement. Retirement is a last chance to fulfill your dream of doing whatever it is that interested, captured, inspired, or motivated you to dream. As already mentioned in a prior chapter, dreams can change over the course of a lifetime. Dreams can also feel different when you enter retirement. If the dream you had while working no longer looks like such a dream once you retire, then abandon it. But if you’ve had a lifelong dream and still haven’t pursued it, then retirement is your time to do it. Even before you retire, investigate the feasibility and cost of your dream. Work the dream’s cost into your budget, and plan your retirement housing, location, and lifestyle to accommodate your dream. Once you retire, don’t put off your dream without having good cause for doing so. Time passes quickly in retirement, and aging can bring on swift decline. Pursue your retirement dream while you’re still able. 

Recreation

If you don’t have a specific and special retirement dream activity, then you may still see retirement as a time for recreation in general. One recreation, traveling, an above chapter has already discussed. The kinds of recreations one hears working individuals discuss for their anticipated retirement certainly include playing a lot more golf and doing a lot more hunting or fishing. Working individuals may assume that when they have more time in retirement, they’d enjoy spending it doing what they already do in their little spare time. Yet that may or may not be true. Some retirees can indeed spend all day every day golfing, fishing, hunting, hiking, biking, shopping, birdwatching, and doing other recreational things that they did just a little of while working. Consider simply doing more of what you were already enjoying doing. But also consider taking on new recreational activities, especially ones that you didn’t have the time and energy to take on when working full time. Gardening, woodworking, cooking, canning, painting, drawing, sewing, quilting, and other arts and crafts may be of the type that would interest you in retirement, once you have the time, attention, and energy that they take. Cast a wide net for enjoyable recreational retirement activities. 

Family

Spending more time with family is another common retirement activity, especially if adult children and grandchildren live some distance away, and visiting with them wasn’t possible before retirement. Time with family can be an especially fruitful activity for retirees. Time with family supplies the close, consistent, and supportive social interaction that otherwise-isolated retirees need. Time with family can also facilitate a retiree’s opportunity to reflect and remember, another important activity discussed further below. Time with family can also involve a variety of subsidiary activities, including any of the recreations mentioned above. Time with family can also include a ministry and service aspect to it, both activities also discussed further below. Caring for your children and grandchildren emotionally and spiritually, and helping them out with building projects, landscaping projects, financial or legal issues, and other needs and interests can be most satisfying to retirees, too. A later chapter discusses in greater detail the subject of family in retirement, including some issues that can arise and how to avoid or address them. But plan abundant family activities, especially including activities with your spouse.

Friends

Spending more time with friends and showing more care and concern for friends can be another satisfying retirement activity. Social interaction with friends can bring much of the benefit of family time but without some of the potential family complications. Retired couples who have one, two, or a handful of other couples with whom they enjoy spending time together can plan a variety of events, from recreations like walking and biking to pleasures like eating out. Time with friends can also refresh and relieve time spent with a spouse. Friends can help you process issues, emotions, and events, celebrate victories, face challenges, and grieve losses. Friends can also provide a gentle corrective for one’s own poor attitude and wrong thinking. Friends can also add to your network for information, resources, and referrals. Late in your work life, be sure that you’re staying in touch with friends, preparing to continue those relationships in retirement. And make new friends once you retire.

Employment

Employment may be the last thing you want to consider as a retirement activity. Yet whether needing to work part time for income or not, many retirees find that some part-time employment can be a rewarding and satisfying activity. As already mentioned in a prior chapter, part-time employment can add structure and schedule to a retiree’s week. Part-time employment can also give a retiree a sense of value, worth, and productivity, even creativity depending on the nature of the employment. Part-time employment can also help a retiree learn, explore, grow, face and overcome new challenges, and meet and befriend new acquaintances. A retiree’s part-time workplace can also give the retiree a sense of community and belonging, even to be needed and missed when away from the workplace. If you don’t have favorite recreations and don’t have nearby family or many friends, consider part-time employment as a way to ensure regular social interaction, structure, and activity. The part-time earnings can be nice, too. Just don’t turn it into full-time work, or you’ll have inadvertently unretired. 

Care

Caring for yourself and, if you’re married when retired, your spouse and household are more-than-legitimate retirement activities. Retirement can feel selfish. A retiree’s main concern is, after all, the retiree’s own care and subsistence. Yet a retiree’s self-care and care for the retiree’s own household aren’t entirely selfish. Caring for yourself in retirement relieves family members and others from taking on your care, perhaps at some substantial sacrifice and burden. Cleaning and straightening up the home, making beds, doing laundry, prepping meals and doing dishes in the kitchen, taking out the trash, getting in the groceries, and other household chores can be highly peaceful, stress-free, and rewarding activities, when taken in the right frame of mind. On one hand, household chores are still chores, when in retirement you might prefer to rest, relax, and engage in recreations. Yet on the other hand, having a home, furnishings, food, and the physical and mental capability to care for oneself and one’s household is a rather remarkable privilege. Not everyone enjoys that privilege. Some of a retiree’s most-satisfying moments can be those times peacefully doing light household chores in their regular and relaxing rhythm. 

Service

Retirees can also benefit from engaging in some form of service activity for others outside of the home. A retiree’s self-care is the retiree’s primary responsibility. But to have the physical and mental ability to also care for and serve others can lend special meaning and purpose to a retiree’s activities. Volunteering at a local elementary school to teach struggling children to read is an example. Mentoring at-risk youths, serving the homeless at a shelter or soup kitchen, making hospital visits for one’s church, or playing in a church or community band are similar examples. Volunteer service activities at any stage of life can be tremendously rewarding but also difficult to pursue when working full time and raising children. Retirement can be the perfect time to fulfill that volunteering dream. Retirees can be vital contributors to their community when gathering in numbers to fill gap social-service needs. If you’re not already connected with a church or charitable organization providing services to underprivileged individuals and families, then explore those opportunities. You may find your volunteering time each month, week, or day to be your favorite retirement activity. 

Ministry

Some volunteering activities are so precious that they cross the boundary from plain service into deep ministry. The activities may involve mentoring, counseling, coaching, or just spending time with disadvantaged others. More important than the activity is the individual or group to whom you minister, whether children, youth, single mothers, young unemployed men, college students, homeless individuals, hospital patients, prisoners, elderly shut-ins, or nursing home residents. Serving others is satisfying. Pouring your wisdom, hope, and assurance into others’ souls is more than satisfying. It is a priceless ministry. Don’t see your volunteering as solely providing a service in some form of transaction. Instead, treat your volunteering as an opportunity to come alongside others who don’t have your vision, strength, faith, confidence, or encouragement. Share your heart and spirit with others, and let them share their heart and spirit with you. Whether you meet with and minister to someone only a single time or repeatedly over a long period, treat those times as precious opportunities to minister to others, beyond mere service.

Perspective

Retirees can also benefit from activities that help them remember and reflect, to gain perspective and insight on their life. Retirement shouldn’t be a busy time of breathless activity. That’s not retirement’s point. You should want to be active enough in retirement to be healthy. Yet you should also want time in retirement to relax, rest, and reflect over your life. You may also have much internal work to do to get your mind, soul, and spirit in a better place and condition. Thus, prefer light activities that encourage you to reflect over your life, remember events, and resolve questions and issues, instead of activities that add challenges, stress, and new issues. Peaceful and simple family activities, not challenging family activities that raise old conflicts, are one example of an activity that may encourage fruitful reflection. Brief social events with former co-workers are another example, when you just might gain some insight or perspective to resolve an old work issue. Leisurely walks or drives with your spouse, brief visits to former neighborhoods, and simple activities outdoors around the home, are other examples of activities that might stir fruitful remembrances. Seek activities that help you gain perspective and let go of burdens, rather than activities that distract you and burden you further. 

Combination

Retirement also shouldn’t be about pursuing a lot of a single activity. That’s generally not the nature of a good and balanced life. Throughout our life, we tend to do many different things at once, preferably in a harmonious and integrated fashion. Make your retirement activities the same way. Don’t feel as if you must jump from one thing to another in haphazard fashion, to fit in every possible thing that you might want to do or accomplish in retirement. Instead, find the right balance and combination of activities. The pattern and synchronicity is out there for you, calling you into gentle and meaningful action. Retirement should, above all, be a time of aligning your thinking, being, and doing with the most-fruitful and resonant rhythm and pattern available to you, all in good time. Let your retirement activities unfold before you, calling you into just the right frame of mind and meaningful, balanced, good, beautiful, and purposeful actions.

Reflection

What activities do you most look forward to in retirement? Do you have a dream activity that you’ve long wished to pursue, that you hope to pursue in retirement? If so, do you have a plan and budget for it? What recreations have you enjoyed during your work life? Do you wish to continue and expand those recreations in retirement? Do you have new recreations that you’d like to try? If so, do you have or can you make friends or acquaintances who already pursue those recreations? Do you look forward to peaceful family activities during retirement? Do you have a circle of friends with whom you plan to socialize regularly in retirement? Would part-time employment add helpful activity, schedule, and structure to your retirement? If so, can you keep employment to part time and not let it interfere with your retirement? Do you enjoy household chores, or can you reprogram yourself to do so? Are you already volunteering in a way that you’d like to continue or expand in retirement? Or do you have other volunteering plans to help others during your retirement? Do you know of a special group of needful individuals to whom you could minister in retirement? What retirement activities could you plan that would help you gain insight and perspective over your life?

Key Points

• Meaningful activity during retirement is essential to enjoying it.

• Pursue your dreams in retirement, if affordable and available to you.

• Enjoy your favorite recreations in retirement, as much as you can.

• Make relaxing family time another featured retirement activity.

• Socialize regularly with good friends for all its retirement benefits.

• Consider part-time employment if you lack activity and interaction.

• Caring for yourself and your household can be a satisfying activity.

• Providing volunteer service to others can get you out of the house.

• Ministering to others who have special needs can be rewarding.

• Seek activities that spur insight and perspective on your life.

• Find a resonant, integrated, and rhythmic combination of activities.

Read Chapter 13.