Do you find yourself waiting to retire so you can finally feel joy and peace, so you can finally travel, create, and live fully? What if you made different retirement plans? What if your retirement started today and you started living the life you truly want right now? Here’s why that’s not Magical Thinking and how it might bring you to life.
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
Danny Kaye
Dawn in Paris.
Thinking about the lens through which we view and create our worlds.
The French decided joie de vivre, vitality, beauty, art, design, wonder, love, sumptuous experiences, and expression would be the tenor chords upon which everything else in life would be built.
There’s no shoe-horning these life essentials into one’s day in tiny dribs and drabs when time permits. You don’t design a life that affords you these essentials only once you’ve walked halfway through it. These ARE life, first and foremost.
Making Different Retirement Plans: Living My Retirement Each Day
One of my financial advisors asked me about my retirement plans during a strategic planning call several weeks ago. I shared my very different retirement plans; I told him I’m living my “retirement” now, every single day, not delaying joy and experiences that bring me alive to some narrowly-defined idea of what one does after 65.
I went on to say that I’ll create and teach and coach and write and continue learning and growing until my last hour.
He was silent for a bit. I waited.
Quietly, catching his breath, he said, “That sounds perfect.”
And yet, I know he will choose differently—which, of course, is his right. He wants to choose my path but believes it’s Magical Thinking (something I’m accused of regularly—as if doing so is impractical or bad).
People are partially correct. It’s not Magical Thinking, but it is Thinking Differently.
And thinking differently about our lives—questioning expectations, rethinking the the standard timeline—is how we create the world and life we want to inhabit.
Get your brain on board with clarity as to what it is you want to have happen, and our all-too-short lives change accordingly.
If your retirement is too far away, make different retirement plans.
