Retirement Thoughts

     In a little over seven months, I will be a retired person. I have done many things in my life, but I have never been a retired person before. I have worked since I was seven years old and had certain chores to do on the farm, and while retirement sounds nice, I am not sure if I will know what to do. There are moments of fear when I think about stepping out of the world in which I have spent most of my life and into a world filled with different sorts of things. Don't get me wrong---it is not that I fear not having anything to do; I have a bucket list as long as my arm of things I want to do which I have not had time to do in my working life. But I wonder....what will it be like to do what I want to when I want to? What will it be like to lose the wristwatch for a day or two at a time, and be answerable to whatever catches my fancy? What will it be like to be responsible only for myself and not the myriad problems which seem to wander so easily into the working world?

      For me, retirement is the great unknown, and I am remembering those days when I left home to go to college and left home to go into the military. Those days were a lot the same...I was moving on into a world where I had never been before to do things I had never done before with people I had never seen before, and it all worked out just fine. I strongly suspect that retirement will work out the same way! The problem now is to stay centered on what I need to do today in order to get to that retirement day, for there is still much to do. So today I work, knowing (and wondering) what tomorrow will bring....