In 2010 I decided, in the absence of any other idea of what retirement from paid employment might entail, that I stood a good chance of living to age 80 or beyond. This gave me a 15-year opportunity to see retirement as (initially) a 15-year creative undertaking, steering my life in new directions. I did what I knew: Drew up a long-term, i.e. 15-year Plan; established a tentative budget; set some ways forward ….
Looking back, it was a useful approach for stepping into the unknown.
There was general advice about surviving into older years relatively fit physically and mentally: Connect with other people; learn new things; be active, especially outdoors; get the basics right so time could be focused on more interesting things; see things as an opportunity; have a healthy diet; and so on.
My Plan had these as its core, and was developed more specifically around a number of strands:
- Wanting to get a better understanding of the ideas and practices of contemporary art.
- Having a reason to visit cities e.g. to look at how different cities approached their use of public art.
- To get more focused on writing – maybe producing around 8 or 12 very varied books.
- Exploring ideas, researching in a quite general way, puzzling over some social issues – and jotting my thoughts onto a dedicated website.
- Doing things for enjoyment, in my own ways and at my own speed. So probably not signing up for long set courses. More setting my own wanderings, going where ideas took me, and avoiding doing things for the sake of it.
- Finding ways of doing these things in contact with others, in manageable ways.
Quite a bit of the early time was spent thinking about the elements pf a framework that would enable a bit of structure whilst being open enough to let me go off along various pathways.
I thought about all the words that might fit with what I most wanted to do. This formed a development vocabulary (and is described in another section). Revisiting this list of words, from time to time, kept reminding me of the overall directions I wanted to go in, and identified emerging gaps for me to consider.
I listed a number of social puzzles that had intrigued me for some time (also described in another section), Revisiting these helped keep the momentum going.
I drafted some general topics that I had kept coming back to before retirement. These acted as some kind of matrix for me to think within.
Taken together, this created a flexible framework for steering my way forwards into the unknowns of retirement.