Living: the ultimate team sport

Voices of the bored retirees.

Posted on January 19, 2012 Updated on February 22, 2012

• “I’m trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life.”
• “I’m a frustrated fish out of water since retiring two years ago.”
• “I’m desperate to find something to fill my time!”
• Woman in her 80’s: “What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?  I feel helpless and hopeless without worthwhile connections.”

I attended a class four and a half years ago comprised of people in their 50’s through their 80’s.  This class was designed to make our Senior years count.  I just now stumbled on notes that I took in that class wherein each class member was asked to make a comment about their current state in life.  The above four comments are just some of those statements.

Desperation and sadness all around me.  I recall now that the mood of this class was one of desperation and sadness as those who yearned for retirement their whole working life found themselves frantically trying to fill their days.  Their feelings were summed up in these words:

• depressed
• lack of purpose
• short-sightedness
• emptiness
• loss of self

Gerontologist, S. Barkin puts it this way regarding our responsibility to be actively walking through our senior years, and I paraphrase,

What do we want to do for the time remaining in our life?   We all should be mining our experiences and the wisdom therein to help with our present and future paths.

As I mentioned in my article, Retirement planning: it’s not what you think, all of us have a history of life skills that should not be put up on a shelf and never used again.  Instead we should be retooling those skills into something that is meaningful and enjoyable to us and beneficial to others.  The students in my class had many thoughts – mostly unfocused and therefore not very productive – but those thoughts had yet to turn into action.

The first step is to decide what is significant to you and act on it.

Aging well starts with the mind but it’s in the doing that makes it count.  We all have a choice when we find ourselves at a loss of purpose: we can stay stuck, or we can actively make a difference in the local community around us.  Baby Boomers are the first generation of peoples to have such a long life span.  We’re living longer so we have more time to pass our knowledge down to others and use our skills in a valuable way.  As the sports company Nike says in one of their ad campaigns:  JUST DO IT!