Our daughter, Helen, said, “I think there’s a difference between traveling and vacationing, Traveling is when you’re sightseeing. Vacationing is when you’re resting.” By that definition, this was a vacation. The weather was atrocious and there’s not much to do in a beach area when that happens.
Beth said, “Hey, this might be what retirement is like.” Gulp.
As we transition into whatever comes next in our lives, Beth and I are trying (or experimenting) with doing less. Most of this week was spent reading, sleeping or going for a walk.
Perhaps, success at vacationing may be more akin to the nothingness of meditation or floating in the Aegean Sea. It’s the “I have no plan plan.”
At first, though, it’s terribly boring.
One of our friends likes to say, “I’m failing at retirement.” I think this is very understandable. We Americans like to have missions: goals we can accomplish even when we’re not working. It’s one of the reasons we are the richest country in the world with more than a little anxiety.
Truthfully, since the moment I became a full-time musician I believed that retirement was highly unlikely. My assumption was that I would walk offstage one day in n my late seventies, load our PA equipment into the truck, come home for a bowl of soup and then die while watching “The West Wing” for the third time.
More recently, though, I have entertained other potential outcomes. In fact, we have recently hired a financial planner to sketch out four different plans.
Of course, this is all assuming that we have some say in our destiny which is almost as hard to predict as the weather.
I’m glad we came to Gulfport, though. Helen is here. And maybe next time we’ll collect some shells.
