I told a friend last night that I had retired. And just like
so many other people I told about my retirement, her first question to me was,
“But what are you going to do now that you’re retired?”
Common question, certainly; a caring question; a curious
question; perhaps even a worrying question.
“What are you going to do?” After all, don’t we need
something to do in order to give meaning to our lives? True. (Note that I am
doing something—I’m writing these lines, something that I rarely had time for
when I was doing what-it-was-that-I-was-doing before retirement.)
And, I must confess, I wonder what I’m going to do as well.
I have a list of projects in mind that I never had the time to dig into before.
But something else is also important. I have to leave the space and the time
open, because there might very well be something that the Lord has in mind for
me to do that I don’t even know about at this point in the journey. So I need
time to slow down, to meditate more, to savor so many of the things that I
didn’t have time to appreciate when I was busy doing ______.
And, above all, I
need to be open to the promptings of the Spirit. That above all.
I’d offer one piece of advice to you if I can, and this is
something that I had to learn the hard way: we all would do well not to
over-identify ourselves with our jobs, titles, roles and functions at any stage
of our life. Because things change. It is far more important to focus on who we
are than on what we do.
And that being said, I have to move on. There are a number
of things I would like to get done today . . .
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