My wife’s younger sister is married to a man who is five years younger than me. Like me, he spent most of his adult life working for the government. Unlike me, he was a civil servant who was eligible to retire at age 50 if he had 20 total years of service, whereas I was employed by the U.S. Foreign Service and while I too could retire from government service at age 50 with 20 years of service, I was required to retire at 65 unless I was in a job that required Senate confirmation (which I was), so I could put off retirement until the job ended.
My brother-in-law retired at 50, 12 years before I hung up my boots, and immediately went into full retirement mode. He and his wife bought a house near a small lake, in a suburb not far from the Gulf of Mexico, and began lives of leisure; her watching soap operas on TV and him sitting on his back porch watching the ducks swimming on the small lake.
Two or three times a month, they go to a casino a few miles away and gamble for a few hours, have a fancy meal, and go home, and three or four times a year, they make the two-hour drive to New Orleans and enjoy the French Quarter for a day.
We visited them once, about six years before I left government service and after four days of their schedule, I was so bored I had headaches and leg cramps. If that was what retirement was all about, I was having none of it.
Nevertheless, when I did finally officially retire, I thought it only fair to give the ‘life of leisure’ a try. For three weeks, we puttered around our home in the suburbs just outside Washington, DC, visited the monuments and zoo, and enjoyed visiting with our first grandchild who lived about 30 miles away in Northern Virginia.
Before the three weeks were up, I was climbing the walls. I don’t think I’ve ever been so bored in my entire life. While I had nothing to do but eat, sleep, and do leisurely things, I found my appetite waning, sleep elusive, and the interesting sites, not so interesting because I felt aimless. I had a back porch, a deck actually, with a forest behind it and all manner of animals and birds to watch and photograph, but that was not something I wanted to do all day.
I needed something to keep my mind and body fully occupied, and the traditional ‘sit back and relax’ retirement just wasn’t cutting it. I began looking for something to do. I didn’t need the money, so that gave me a lot of flexibility.
Fortunately, for someone with my work history and experience, there were a lot of options, despite my age. I did consulting, which involved a lot of traveling. I even got a gig from a Canadian magazine that involved a trip to Cameroon.
I also started accepting the invitations for speaking engagements—as long as the inviters paid travel and lodging—many were also willing to pay speaker’s fees. That led to being invited to lecture at various institutions, and that has led to a parttime job as teaching faculty doing an online graduate course for a well known university. I get lots of requests to speak, most involving travel, so many that I have to turn down half of them—oh joy. I’ve also been invited to be on the boards of several organizations that are involved in some fascinating endeavors.
So, I suppose technically I am retired, but I no longer even use that term. When people ask, I just say I left government eleven (now) years ago and became a private consultant.
Sit on the back porch and watch ducks? No way. I’d much rather sneak through the brush and take pictures of them for a nature publication. | NWI
