“But you look too young to be retired”
That’s a comment we hear a lot on our travels and it’s a compliment of course. We usually say” thankyou , that’s kind of you,” but the response I’d rather make is;
“Isn’t retirement best taken when you’re young? Why leave retirement till you’re too old to enjoy it?”
Most of us leave retirement till it’s too late. We think we have plenty of time left and of course we think we’ve never got enough money to retire. It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s take a look at retirement and what it actually is.
In part, I think that the word retirement is actually the wrong word to use. People usually conjure up retirement with visions of old people in wheel chairs and no teeth living in pensioner homes that smell of boiled cabbage as the ‘patients’ wait for their next round of medication.
Well, let me tell you, that’s not the retirement I mean. For me, early retirement would be to reach a stage in life when you can “live your dream” whatever that may mean for you. To not be a slave to a time clock or a boss or anyone else. To awaken each day and be master of your own destiny, to spend your time doing pretty much what you please – so long as that is lawful and does not impact negatively on anyone else – and to go to bed each night content with yourself. Wouldn’t this be a ‘dream life’? Wouldn’t this be like ‘rejoining life’?
So we need another word or phrase that more correctly describes this stage of life that early retirement actually means. My dictionary defines retirement as; “to give up ones regular work because of age, to cause an emplyee to give up regular work, to retreat, to go to bed”.
Retirement could also mean that I was tired once , but now I’m re-tired. Really tired, exhausted, wrung out.
This does not decribe what it is we’re talking about here with early retirement.
What I am talking about is almost the opposite. I’m talking about giving up unfulfilling work and an unsatisfying lifstyle in order to embrace life, to grasp life with both hands and to live life to the utmost.
And to do this while you are still young enough and fit enough and mentally agile enough to do so. It’s a state of rejoining life, so I’m going to use a word coined by Rob Gibson, a Scottish Member of Parliament, and that word is Relifement.
Relifement is a word I like as it conjures up a state of reclaiming life, of being rejuvenated by life as distinct from and completely different to retirement, for when I am all wrung out.
Retirement I’ll leave to when I can’t climb mountains or ride my mountain bike anymore. I’ll take Relifement now while I’ve got the chance, thanks.
I see no reason why a whole new sub group should not now emerge; a group that we call Relifers. This group is self reliant, have independent means, think freely and are answerable only to themselves and what is of value to them. These people are free to spend their days in whatever pursuits they want – and many choose to spend their time in a type of work or voluntary calling of their choice. Relifers don’t all spend their time on the golf course or down around the swimming pool. But the point is, these people are free to spend their time as they want without the need to go to ‘work’ and this is the difference.
This group are probably sucessful people in their mid fifties and onwards (the Baby Boomers) but needn’t be confined to that age only.
For example, what would we call a successful sports person, who by age 30 had earned a good few dollars and was now retired (there’s that word again) from the sport? You certainly wouldn’t call that person washed up and only good for being put out to pasture or into an old persons home.
Typically the successful ‘retired’ sportsperson reinvents himself and moves onto other pursuits. Good for them, this I would call Relifement, as it implies being free to follow their new aspirations.
I had a bank manager once who announced, at about age 45 years, that he was packing up and moving his family away so that he could do missionary work, a calling that he had been suppressing for some time. Isn’t this a type of Relifement?
My own parents, in their late forties, turned their backs on conventional life and went into the wilderness for about 18 months. There, they built a log cabin, put in a large vegetable garden and hunted wild animals for food, and enjoyed what they later described as the most enjoyable times of their life together. Of course their lives were never the same again after that – it was much better than anything they had experienced up till then.
Maybe this is where I got the idea that it was fine to redefine one’s life and seek satisfaction.
If you could do for work what you now do for a hobby or passion, would this not be Relifement? Do you love sailing so much you’d be prepared to give up work and start a sailing school for stressed out excutives, or do you love photograpy so much you’d take that long dreamed of expedition to get those fabulous images?
And what about people who sell an upstart business or win a large amount in a lottery or inherit a small fortune at a relatively young age? These people usually have trouble adjusting to their new found wealth and freedom as they’ve never experieced it before but mostly because there is no visable model that they can align themselves to which gives them a pathway towards Relifement.
Society is full of encouragement to work hard and save and not be wasteful and this is all very commendable. There is always a time to work hard for your own future, to provide a stable platform for yourself and your family. Don’t misunderstand me, there is nothing wrong with that.
What I’m talking about here is “When do I know that I’ve done enough?” Life does not have to be one huge self imposed treadmill.
We’ve all heard sayings like ‘save for a rainy day’ and ‘you reap what you sow’ but what is the saying that says ‘there’s a time to harvest and enjoy’?
Do you know of any farmer who left the crop in the fields longer and longer in the belief that it would get better? Or the orchardist who left the apples on the trees thinking they would get riper when in fact all that happened was the apples fell off the trees and rotted on the ground. These folk would be considered foolish farmers or orchardists.
I believe life’s like that. There is a time to sow and tend the fields, but there is also a time to harvest and enjoy the fruits of your labours.
Ecclesiastics says it in Chapter 3;
1. There is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.
2. ……. a time to plant and a time to uproot ……
