A good comparison

A student who came in today heard I am retiring and he said, "Ah, you're graduating."

He has a good point. Next week will be commencement, a new beginning, with all the excitement and trepidation that our graduates experience.

Things I won't miss

There are lots of things I will definitely miss when I retire, but here's one I won't:

Oblivious students walking across campus.

I am well aware they have only 10 minutes to get from one class to another, and that sometimes they are cold and wet and in a hurry. But oblivious is dangerous. There are very good reasons that Mom said not to step out from between parked cars, or to walk out behind a car that is very obviously backing up.

It looks like I'm going to manage to get out of here without running over one of them that I couldn't avoid. For that I am grateful.

OK, forgive me..... I am going to make this TWO things I won't miss when I retire. The other is parking wands. It took me three years to learn where the sweet spot is on my dashboard that makes the gate go up without wild waving, but the gates aren't consistent and I'm never sure whether I'm going to get through or not. In a couple of weeks I give back the wand and get a double reward: I eliminate not only that frustration but also the monthly parking charge. Keep accentuating the positive......

First steps

First official step that's come along: I turned in my corporate purchasing card today. There's no longer time for me to buy anything with it. I packed up the first two boxes of photos and assorted papers and carried them to the car. Tomorrow I visit HR just to make sure I've got all the paperwork done, and then I turn in my official retirement letter.

Right now my office has little piles all over. The past few days I've been going through my files, trying to throw out anything that nobody would care about but me, so that the next person in this office won't have to. Doing that means, though, that I have to recognize, piece by piece, that this item that was important to me is now needed and wanted by nobody.

Meanwhile the students drop in for advice, and ask what they are going to do in January. My job, as well as the other adviser's, will likely not be filled until months from now. One person, working at it part-time, will be advising all three print publications. The students will have to learn to be even more self-sufficient. They will survive, but it's not ideal. I haven't changed my mind about retiring, but I do feel like I'm abandoning them and wish I could be around to answer their questions.

Anybody else out there have this problem with the closing-out process?

Midwestern Five-Point Plan

his drop cap was found accidentally -- serendipitously -- while surfing the Web looking for something else. It reminded me of some wise thoughts from another of my friends, a colleague at a state school in the Midwest who has been retired for a year. She developed a five-point guide for her retirement. Each day she tries to include five things: 1) something she does for herself; 2) something she does for others; 3) something for the inside of her house; 4) something for the outside of her house; and 5), the one that reminded me of this: something professional. Like my colleague, I want to keep developing my professional abilities in retirement and the Web has more resources than I will ever be able to tap. If you like design too, try this fun site, www.dailydropcap.com.

Sabbatical!

Since I worry about the pitfalls Andrei Codrescu apparently fell victim to (see Nov. 19 post), I liked the idea expressed by my long-ago bridesmaid, now a grandmother happily retired on the West Coast. "It's nice to have a new start in life's next chapter and take your time filling in the pages," she wrote on my Facebook page. "I said 'no' to anything new for six months and called it my sabbatical."

That sounded like a great idea so I wrote her back for more thoughts. Now that she's been retired almost two years, she says, "I do get more ideas than I would have time to do so I think on most for awhile and if still sounds like fun, move ahead. If it stops being fun, I try something else. The main thing I have to watch out for is not adding too many 'little' things as they add up. If I start something new, what goes on the back burner? And some days it's nice to be just free to take a walk, read, whatever. Enjoy the new experiences."

Old friends really are gold, aren't they!

Vision and mission

I promised a different post for today and I'll try to write that one later, but first, I thought of something while reading a report one of the students just turned in from a recent convention she attended. She wrote up a session led by an adviser from Stetson University about a publication's vision and mission. A mission statement, she wrote, helps solve dilemmas about what to do and a vision statement "explains who you want to be." I have, in my job, helped craft vision and mission statements for publications and for a professional organization, but I've never developed them for myself. Reading her report, I am struck by the idea that it would be a good thing to do particularly at the time of retirement. Once done, "it is a good idea to post your statements where you can see them every day," she added. I think I oughta do that......

Andrei Codrescu

I have a friend, a medical professional, whose life is harried: too much to do, too much stress. Retiring means leaving all that behind, yes? But I have friends who are retired, and some of them seem harried too: too much to do, never catching up, too much stress. How can that be? I had wondered about this long before the thought of my own retirement entered my mind. A year or so ago I heard Andrei Codrescu, well-known author and former English professor, talk on NPR about his retirement -- about his "crazy idea" that in retirement he would have time to do all the reading he had long wanted to do. Instead, he said, "I discovered something: Hundreds of jobs that you never did when you had a more or less regular job are waiting patiently for you to retire. And the minute you do, they pounce on you." Read his whole piece; it's humorous but still discouragingly (to me at least) entitled, "In Retirement, No Time for Free Time."

I was determined not to let that happen, but I wasn't sure how to prevent it. Then, a college friend -- my long-ago bridesmaid -- offered a suggestion. That, however, is for tomorrow's (or maybe Mondays') post.

Gains and losses

Retirement can be hard in the little ways as well as the big ways. Tonight I was shopping with my daughter and saw a brightly colored necklace that made me think, "Oh, I can wear that to work! The students will think it is so cute." But in the next moment I realized, "No -- In another month I won't see the students anymore." No more bright-eyed students popping in at my office door, no more long conversations in which I learn what it's like to be a 20- or 21-year-old in today's world. After spending thousands of hours since 1990 in the company of these bright and creative young people, what is it going to be like to not see them any more? Will all the free time make up for that loss? I don't know.

Initial posting

There are lots of retirement blogs out there but I will try to make this one different. For one thing, you won't find any financial advice here. This is all about mental preparation for retirement. And it will be unique because it will be retirement preparation seen through my own lens -- that being the only one I can see through. But I am a Boomer, so I have a number of friends who have either already retired or are considering it, and I have garnered a lot of ideas from them.

My retirement date is edging closer day by day. I have made some progress in the mental preparation, but I'm not there yet. My plan is for this blog to show on a daily or semi-daily basis how the thinking is going, and hopefully to make it as interesting as possible. And I hope it will be helpful too, if you're one of those facing this particularly challenging time of life. Check back in a day or two and see what's here.