Now that I am retired, and have been for about half a year, I am coming to realize just how different retirement is from working life. The pace of “retirement time” is different, the schedule is different. All of a sudden I can decide exactly what I am going to do with each day… or not.
When I was working, my life was very scheduled. Hours when I needed to be at work, projects that needed to be planned and scheduled and worked on and completed. Appointments of every kind, business and personal, had their spots on the calendar. I would schedule my exercise, I would schedule meals and cooking, and I would schedule shopping for groceries, clothes, car repairs, and kitty litter. Housecleaning was scheduled, paying quarterly taxes, paying bills, renewing licenses and memberships — all scheduled on the calendar. Everything needed to be scheduled because life was busy and there was so little available time. So lock it in, put it on the calendar.
Once I retired, I was ready to wipe that calendar and start with a clean slate. Of course there are things I will still need to do even though I am no longer working. Some of those things will likely go back on the calendar. But I stopped a lot of things when I stopped working, just to break out of the routine and begin to build a new kind of life.
One biggie was weight management. I need to manage my weight because of arthritis, and so I had been logging calories in and calories out every day for nearly six years. I’ve been using LoseIt for this, and logging helped me lose about 50 pounds. Even though I still need to watch my weight, I was ready to stop the logging and see if I could do it more naturally with just a morning weigh-in to keep on track. The only thing I log now in LoseIt is my weight.
One other biggie was learning French, which involves a bit of study every day in Duolingo. This I did not give up when I retired, and now I have more time for it. (I suppose learning French is one of my “hobbies.”) I also wanted to continue Alliance Française classes, which meet weekly and require some ongoing textbook study. Those classes were the first thing to go back on the calendar in January 2023. By now I am pretty good at French reading, writing, and listening comprehension. But speaking and actually having a free-flowing conversation in French remains elusive. After a winter and spring class with Alliance, I decided to pick up another app, Falou, to help with the speaking. So now I have Duolingo and Falou on my calendar and I am trying to make that a daily habit.
The daily weigh-in, and being mindful of my eating, and planning meals, and studying French for one or two hours each day, these things have become the backbone of my day. The rest of my calendar and my day are “free” and available for me to fill any way I like. It’s kind of amazing, really!
Two other dailies for me are internet hobbies: Current Events and Investing. I’ll have more to say about those in another post.