How To Face Retirement Positively
By Dobbs Franks
When reaching the age when you are forced to alter your lifestyle whether you want to or not is equally as painful and confusing as the mid-life crisis which you somehow survived a few years ago.
What is the most constructive way of approaching this next phase of life. At first it seems almost insurmountable. When you have spent your first 65+ years mostly in a specific pursuit it is not only difficult to adjust to a different way of thinking and living but often seems extremely unfair.
One of the easy things to fall victim to is to feel sorry for yourself. It is easy to think that you have spent all these years doing good works and being a good hard working person, a responsible family member, possibly a parent and even a grandparent. How is it fair to have to pay the terrible price of changing your whole lifestyle at this stage. Why can't life be reasonable and present you with a reward for having gotten this far and done this well.
If you succumb to the self pitying scene you will live to wish you hadn't. Just stop and think about the qualities of the people you like and want to be around. Do they have any of the above traits? The answer is probably in the negative. We all like to be around happy, outgoing and interesting people. The last people we seek out are the unhappy, self pitying sorts.
So, what can we do at this change in life to maintain our cheerfulness and attractiveness so that we will attract friends and acquaintances with whom we will enjoy being?
Personally I have found the way for me. It has taken some real deep thinking and planning. It is not an easy transition to make. But, I am here as witness to the fact that it can be made and life can continue to be a beautiful and desirable thing.
One of the first things we have to come to grip with, and for me the most difficult, is that our friends and acquaintances will one by one be dying. The more difficult one is when our partner, siblings or others truly close to us begin to die as well. It isn't long before you reach the age when people you know and have been close to are within 10 to 15 years either side of your age. This means that when you reach 65+ you will begin to be faced with frequent deaths of people you care about or who were important in your life.
How do you deal with this? I think everyone has to develop his own way of dealing with death, particularly of the death of someone close and/or important.
After the shock and self pitying begins to recede one has to find a way to honor the life that is no longer with you. You can never do this through denial of any sort. I find that an active act of remembrance or a token of recognition of the value of that life can be very helpful. For me remembering and living with the influence and memory of these people in an active way is far more beautiful and productive than trying to forget them or put them out of my mind and 'get on with my own life'.
As time goes on the list gets bigger, but if you keep a diary of the dates of their deaths and do something special each year, it is a very healing and helpful exercise. At least, it is for me.
About the author
To discover crazy things about life in retirement as well as receive a free special report go browse these two websites of Dobbs Franks WebCashStore and Random Thoughts of a Cluttered Mind from http://www.FreeArticlesAndContent.com
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