Retire, retread, or rejuvenate?
All of life is juxtaposed. When we are kids, we want to grow up. When we are grown up, we can’t wait to retire. When we retire, we want to maintain our youth—or at least many of us do.
If we want to continue moving along the continuum of life with enthusiasm, we need a sense of continued purpose and forward movement. The alternative looks like this: chronologically young people whose eyes and attitudes have dulled, whose energy or verve for life has waned. Is being content with the nightly news, something to eat, and going to bed really something to look forward to? I’m guessing there’s more, and I’ll bet you believe there is, too.
There has been a lot of discussion lately on retirement and the financial implications of our recession-changed economy. Many people are adjusting their original time line for retirement. This may not be all bad. I’m curious about how retirement itself affects our life and our sense of purposefulness. Retirement in the traditional sense of working 30 to 40 years, getting the gold watch, and then settling back may, at this point, seem out of the question. How desirable is that kind of retirement anyway?
According to Dictionary.com, retire is defined as:
–verb (used without object)
1. to withdraw, or go away or apart, to a place of privacy, shelter, or seclusion: He retired to his study.
2. to go to bed: He retired at midnight.
3. to withdraw from office, business, or active life, usually because of age: to retire at the age of 60.
4. to fall back or retreat in an orderly fashion and according to plan, as from battle, an untenable position, danger, etc.
5. to withdraw or remove oneself: After announcing the guests, the butler retired.
Who really wants to aim for a ho-hum life? Even in retirement, who really wants to slow down to the point of fading away? The word retirement makes me pause. When we retire a horse, we put it out to pasture. When we retire a model of car, it’s not made anymore. When we retire, do we sit back in the recliner of life and doze off? I’m guessing there’s a reason it’s called a recliner. Maybe it should be called a decliner.
Consider instead the word retread. Again, Dictionary.com comes to the rescue with a pretty clear definition:
1. to put a new tread on either by recapping or by cutting fresh treads in the smooth surface.
When we retread a tire, we add something to it to reinforce it, or we create fresh new grooves to prepare it for additional valuable miles. We don’t retread tires with no intention of continuing to drive. We intend to use those newly grooved tires to go even farther than we have before.
Perhaps this is a way to look at life: retread not retire. Add a fresh resurfacing to the areas in life that may have become worn and venture over valuable new miles on the road of life. If there is a way of keeping youthful qualities regardless of the number of years, a form of rejuvenation must be part of the equation.
When I look at retirement as a future option, I far prefer the synonyms of rejuvenation: breathe new life into, do, do up, exhilarate, give face lift to, give new life to, modernize, reanimate, reclaim, recondition, reconstruct, recover, refresh, refurbish, regenerate, rehab, reinvigorate, renew, renovate, restitute, restore, retread, revitalize, revivify, spruce, spruce up, update. (Source for all definitions used: www.dictionary.com.)
I am not advocating the ever-popular worship of youth. It’s obvious that none of us can stop the hands of time. But how purposeful and active those hands are would seem to be the most essential evaluation. What would happen if we stopped living for retirement and started just living … retreading when we needed, rejuvenating all along the path? Perhaps the goal is not retirement but the next phase of life where, albeit in a more mature, even aging body, one is able to retread the previous life with new focus and new energy while continuing to move forward with purpose.
For an interesting thought on starting a new life and purpose at 65, look at the life of world-famous Colonel Sanders, who started the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise at the age of 65! I guess he had a few big things yet to accomplish. http://www.kfc.com/about/colonel.asp