Five minutes after the stroke of midnight, I realized one major difference from other years on New Year’s Eve: I’m retired. It came like this: I celebrated, toasted and some people came up with the idea of tackling the topic.
The time to listen to two thoughts and my new social condition was revealed to me. So suddenly? It didn’t come by chance. You’ve never thought about it, you may say? Now, there’s a trick, the most banal trick that can exist. Nothing will change for me, I will continue to do what I did before and always be the master of what I want to happen to me. But undoubtedly two reflections came to me: we are talking about the time in which the risk is to lose control of one’s life.
I remember the near-depression that gripped my father for the first six months of his retirement, a mixture of sensations of uselessness and decline, which he then fortunately transformed into great potential for renewed life opportunities. If this is the family tradition, I would like to avoid the depression phase when it happens. In this sense, I decided to start preparing myself, you never know I’ll freak out and I don’t mean it seriously to retire as soon as possible. And so I made a small decalogue, ten blank sheets on which I will begin to trace paths, so as not to be unprepared when needed.
Like what? Like:
1) Equip yourself in time, for a interests network;
2) Stop in this reflection: when a person stops dreaming and loses his good mood he is already old, regardless of how old he is. Retirement doesn’t extinguish the dreams that will have to continue to populate our dreams and our awakenings, within that network of interests that we defined in time;
3) A Must: boredom is the daughter of regret of the past, happy life is the day we are living with full awareness;
4) Retirement planning: if you are a couple, it must be done with your partner, if the retirement will not be contemporary, it is right to plan the roles that will necessarily have to be renewed.
5) A little secret: don’t overdo it, don’t mark your retirement days with the ferocity with which you used to manage your working days. You are obligated to nothing except to cultivate otium, understood not as sweet doing nothing, but as doing everything with the necessary serenity of soul. The rule is not having to do anything by force, but, if you have to do it, with pleasure.
6) Another secret? Mens sana in corpore sano: getting up early in the morning, not going to bed too late, adequate diet, movement consistent with physical health, outdoors, friends, playing, talking, narrating, life plans also associated with some role. And so on and so forth.
7) If you feel some discomfort from retirement, share it with your partner, with your children, with your friends: they will insult you, it will do you good.
8) As much as possible hate sofas, armchairs and television. If you really have to attend them, to the extent that they are accomplices of your comforts, not of inconveniences.
Did I say decalogue? Yes, I said decalogue. Now I have to get ready to restart with work after New Year’s Eve. The retired, currently on paper, undertakes to return to all of you as soon as possible to complete the decalogue. In the meantime, I’ll start preparing, first of all by thinking that the decalogue (at the moment octalogue) of the retired is not so extraneous to the condition of still being in business: in general, 2023 brought me at least one news.
