Traveling after you retire

Actually, adapting to be retired is much more serious than traveling when you retire.

What do I mean by this?

It takes around 5 years to adjust to being retired and some people (who are workaholics or worriers) never adjust to being retired because they need to be distracted by work all the time.

So, defining which type of person you are will depend upon whether you even survive 1 to 5 years as a retired person in the first place.

I would define myself as a traveling contemplative which means I'm happy to be somewhere beautiful with my wife and friends. Not everyone is like this.

For example, just before world war II my father chartered a yacht and spent two years in Tahiti and the Tuomoto Archipeligo with his wife and brother. He was 24. His wife was I think 21 and his brohter was 22. For him this didn't work because he had already become a workaholic by age 24 and couldn't adjust to so much free time. So, when he returned to the U.S. as World war II was starting. (they sailed on a yacht to Tahiti in 1939) he mostly worked the rest of his wife and mostly took off only weekends from work after that (except for vacations with me and my Mom) which mostly were vacations to religious retreats like Mt. Shasta which is how I came to love the whole Mt. Shasta area too by age 5 years of age.

So, when my father returned from 2 years in Tahiti and Hawaii as the war began in the Pacific he mostly worked a lot from then on. Luckily, he had already served in the Marine Air Corps reserves from 1934 until 1937 as a Hellcat Biplane gunner already. He told me how they would dive bomb people on the beach in Seattle and do loop the loops all the time.

So, when he returned he was married and old enough not to be drafted so he worked as an electrician building Liberty ships there in Seattle with his older Brother who also was an electrician then. Their father was an Electrical Contractor and eventually my father and his brother were Electrical Contractors too. I worked with my father summers from 1960 to 1966 when I graduated High School At a private school in Santa Fe, new Mexico my last year in High School.

Then I also worked with him for about 8 months when I was 21 when I had burned out being a computer programmer for awhile. (There were no computer chips or Ram then except in NASA applications). So, chips were still sort of "Top secret" at that point.

So, traveling when you retire can be great but first you need to make sure you can handle it in the normal process of your new life.

For example, you don't want to take the best trip in your life because you are retired and then come back and just get so depressed at being retired that you die.

I think looking at retirement sort of like you once looked at summer vacations when you were growing up is useful.

In other words retirement is like a NEVER ENDING SUMMER WINTER AND SPRING VACATION.

So, you need to begin to cope with that.

So, people who are retired say things like "Being retired is both the best thing and the worst thing that has ever happened to me!"

These are the two sides of being retired that everyone has to learn to deal with who retires.

Because that is true. For most people being retired is both the best and the worst thing that ever happened to them at the same time.

The highs of being retired are easy to cope with but you also have to learn to cope with the lows as well or you are just gone.

For example, just getting drunk every day (this has never been my problem by the way) just leads to you dying in a year or two. So that doesn't work either.

So, for me, staying sober, eating well, traveling and walking my dogs (if any were alive still) is what I do every day I'm home to stay centered. Walking or biking or running if you can still run will give you runner's high and then it raises your serotonin in your brain which elevates your mood. (I had to stop running every day in my 40s because I discovered I had hundreds of microfractures from my youth from jumping off of roofs with my friends from ages 8 or 9 to 15 or 16. I was a very active child climbing trees and jumping my bike and having a newspaper route to make money and all that.

I started running down an unfinished Freeway nearby us in Los Angeles during my teens at night and kept running regularly into my 40s when my feet got bone spurs and hurt too much after that to run anymore.

This week has been really tough for my wife and I because she returned from a trip with our two daughters to Ireland, England and Scotland and I spent the last month in Mt. Shasta and Portland so we hadn't seen each other in one month. And when she saw me last I didn't know whether I could recover from Congestive Heart Failure or not but I did by changing diuretic medicines over time.

So, my coughing finally went away and so I could sleep once again after not sleeping much or at all for a month so I eventually recovered even though I'm 70. But then again I'm used to almost dying because this sort of thing has often happened in my life ever since the Archangels came and healed me of my whooping cough at age 2 in 1950.

So, angels coming and healing me or Jesus coming and healing me is something I have grown used to since I was 2. This is just something that often happens to me along the way.

By God's Grace

So, basically what I'm saying here is that we each have to find our way after we retire because we are all different in every way. So, pace yourselves so you can handle not only the highs of being retired but also the lows.

If you think being retired is a good thing you will be fine. If you think being retired is a bad thing likely that could kill you. It's all in your mind.

If you understand this you understand everything.

Note:

By the way I was forced to retire in 1998 from a heart virus so I have already been retired 20 years basically. So, not only have I learned a lot about blogging during this time I also have learned a lot about being retired.

There are different types of challenges you face along the way. The first is money. How much can you spend monthly and be okay? So, learning about this is important. So, maybe thinking about how much you can spend usefully on a yearly basis might be important. Then figuring out how much you can travel and not starve to death the rest of the time might be important. Also, how much are you going to have to financially help your children or other relatives? This changes all the time by the way.

So, if you are patriarch or Matriarch of your family like my wife and I are now this is a lot of responsibility whenever there are emergencies in your children's or grandchildren's lives.

So, you have to figure out what to do in all sorts of situations. For me, it's a lot like being a fireman or a Fire Captain waiting for a fire to put out. I have to be always ready but being ready keeps me alive and functional always. So, this is a good thing.