Viva! 2016 retirement

I don’t like to write about things, I don’t do myself in praxis. Now, that I am retired for some months, I can share some of my impressions so far and about my new period in life. First I have to tell, that I worked as a sports teacher till the very end, though all my years of service and I loved to do it. The direct work with children always made me happy and I could have done it for many more years to come.

But what counts most in life, is time, which I now got and which I can use for everything I love to do. Because of work obligations, I never had enough time to spend on my other things I would have had liked to do. Jokingly I always said, I had so much work, that I didn’t have enough time to go to work, but it was still somewhat true. Countless times I ate and at the same time read the newspaper, talked on the phone and thought about what I still had to do. I have done everything at full speed, walked to work, spend time with family, wrote, lectured, climbed… and was therefore equally exhausted, sometimes even drop-dead tired. I was efficient, but equally insufficiently tired. The biggest priority when retiring is, that the time I used to spend on my workplace, I can now use for other things. I can eat breakfast in peace and after that read the newspaper. When I am done reading, I still have enough time to think about what I actually read about. And every activity that follows, which I myself choose, of course, I do more calmly and collectively. Therefore, I can be more efficient. Peace and freedom to choose what I can do next is such a big privilege to me, that a whole new world opened up to me, when I retired.  

The statement, that retirees don’t have any time left, of course, is not true. I even think that they only made it up so they can more easily manipulate it to their liking. The first weeks, I still had some of my old work reflexes left, thinking that holidays or weekends would be too short and that I had to still do some work in these free days. What a relief that, each time thinking this, I remembered that the Monday, on which I had to go back to work, will never come again.

Retirement is not something I see as a period where I stop working, not at all. The knowledge I accumulated as a sports teacher, I will use to the end. I will still write, climb, travel, do sports and other activities, which make me happy, and I can do them even more intensely. But not only that, even tasks which were annoying to me in the past, like household chores or buying groceries, I now do with much less annoyance than before.

In conversations with friends and acquaintances, when talking about the blessing of retirement, some of them agree, but mostly they disagree. Some miss their old jobs for various reasons and I try to understand them. But I simply cannot understand that just because they don’t go to work anymore, they get bored or sink into despondency.

In conversations with friends and acquaintances, when talking about the blessing of retirement, some of them agree, but mostly they disagree. Some miss their old jobs for various reasons and I try to understand them. But I simply cannot understand that just because they don’t go to work anymore, they get bored or sink into despondency.