On Monday it will be 500 days until I retire. I know that people are sick and tired of hearing me counting down and talking about how excited I am. There really are a number of reasons that I feel this way. For one, like many other people I know, I have been working some type of job since I was around 14 years old. That's over 40 years AT WORK! I feel like I have missed so much, so many things, so many memories because I was AT WORK. At work...some days it didn't seem like work, some days it felt like I was going to break because I worked so hard. I raised my kids, coached their team, lead their Girl Scouts, put millions of miles on my car, and attended college to get my Bachelors degree all while i was AT WORK! I'm still trying to spend as much time with my grandbabies, trying to get to their soccer games, baseball, karate, concerts, school plays, dance recitals but WORK keeps getting in the way. Secondly, I never really thought I would ever be able to retire. I seriously figured they would wheel me out dead in my chair. I never felt that I would be able to afford to retire, that I wouldn't make enough to make ends meet. When I first started working for the County, I didn't realize how important putting that money into my pension fund meant. Thirdly, when I started working there, I was pretty much the baby of the group, the youngster.. So now all of my close friends that I've worked with have now retired and I get to see how much they are enjoying their lives AT PLAY!
I want to be AT PLAY!
I am also now the "old lady" in my department. I am pretty much settled in my ways, and although I love my job, I'm wearing down. I am to the point that the things I want to learn have nothing to do with WORK, they have more to do with PLAY! I want to learn how to work my camera better, I want to learn how to decorate cakes and paint and create stained glass works of art. I don't want to learn about cloud storage, virtual environments, augmented reality, agile development methods or the best web platforms. I want to spend more minutes in my grandbabies lives. I want to spend more time with my children and my husband. We want to travel and see things and go on adventures together. When you are young, it seems like life just drags on, but when you get older, you realize how fast time has gone and how much time you have wasted and you want to get as much in as you can before you can't.. Or at least that's how I feel.
Both Mike and I used to get up in the morning and go to work and not really think about retirement too much. It's just that now that it's visible.. it's possible, and it's a reality.. We both look at work differently now. It's like you've been there so long and you've seen so much that you just kind know that it's time to go. Time to walk away from the bull crap, from the drama and from the work. We can afford to retire, we're not rich by any means, but we will survive. It's time to let the younger people have the opportunity now.
In 501 days I will wake up in the morning, I will get a cup of coffee, I will smile.. I won't have to be AT WORK ever again. I will finally be able to be AT PLAY. Where will I start? I know that first day will be a big shock to me. It will be hard to forget that habit. I already have started a bucket list but I think I will probably savor that first day, just absorb the realization that MY WORK is done, MY PLAY can start. I've paid my dues, my time as come.
The biggest issue is... how will I ever get through these next 500 days?????
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