Pseudo Retirement: Or The Life Lessons I Am Learning At The Moment

She had retired from her school administrator position and really didn’t see hanging around in Toronto as any sort of viable option. And since this, meaning Niagara, was a part of the country we knew well and liked a lot, well here we are.

St Catharines, where we live now, is a small city (about 135,00 souls) on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. If you walk up to the lake on a decent day you can see Toronto quite clearly about 30 or so miles more or less due north.

It’s like a big city composed of smaller cities and towns and less than half the size of the Greater Toronto Area

The farthest we can go in this network of towns takes up maybe 25 minutes of relatively pain-free highway driving. Considerably longer and more enjoyable if you take the back roads, which we often do.

Our favourite drive is the one that takes us to a store called Lococo’s in the north end of Niagara Falls, where we buy the best ribeye steaks we have ever had. This drive is great l because it takes us through a big part of wine country, and then down to the Niagara Gorge which is the area between the Falls and the mouth of Lake Ontario to the north.

The views, pretty much all year round, are wonderful. And the gorge itself, from wherever you stop to look at it, is an amazing bit of nature.

But I Digress

As I said, my wife retired, but you would never know it because she is busy as hell with some of the groups she has joined.

When we first moved here, I spent the first few months going back and forth to Toronto on projects I had there. But location is everything and I really didn’t make this move to become a commuter, so I just let all but one account, slip away. I then joined a networking group found a partner in crime and went to work hustling business down here.

All the time, though, my wife and my sister, who lives in Fort Erie and is here a lot, kept dropping subtle hints about the the option that I had available to myself of not actually needing to work.

The trouble with that is that I simply did not have a plan B, and never really have had one in my life. And you know what they say about old habits.

But finally, and after much consternation, and realizing that a high end consulting partnership was a bit too rich for this market, I decided to give it a try. I wasn’t going to call it retirement. Because, after a visit with my pal Bill Tibbles who lives up in Fergus, I decided that I was simply, as he put it so eloquently, ‘letting the game come to me’.

This was enough of a state of retirement to satisfy the pro-retirement cheerleading squad and enough of the feeling that I would still be in it, but without the madness of being in it up to my eyeballs.

The Pseudo Retirement

This all started in the spring of this year this year, which was perfect timing because it’s a lot easier to be pseudo-retired when the weather is nice, and it gave me time to adjust and figure out how to mosey on through the winters.

This year, we had a new liner put in the pool and so I got all new water and a startup course on the care and feeding of the pool from scratch from my peeps at the pool supply store I go to, and Rob The Pool Guy, who opens and closes the pool for us. I swam every day, about 60 lengths and learned how to take really good care of the water. I also rode my bike everywhere even all the way down to the highway just to buy some lettuce.

Over the course of the summer I also did some work for my scrap metal guys, who now have a new web site and me to republish or write new blogs for them a couple times a month, plus provide them with whatever artwork they would need for the events they host and the sponsorships they do in their communities.

The last 6 months have been the first time in my adult life that I have been able to get out of bed in the morning without a long list of work things to do. I’m still not sure about how I feel about that, especially, now that I am being treated by a chiropractor who is helping me repair the ill effects of many years of big time slouching.

I am about a third of the way through this process and have already started to notice a marked increase in energy and stamina as my spine and my hips move slowly and hopefully, surely, back into proper alignment.

The Pseudo Flip Side

Of course, the downside of all of this is that my increased energy level is accompanied by a strong dose of nostalgia for the time that I was really IN IT!. Shit!

I will do my best to resist but I have already started planning a local direct email campaign to see if I can’t hustle up one solid local client to do writing and art direction for. I have a good database, and a great financial proposition, because it’s not about money, so I can be very accommodating in that regard. It’s about purpose, because we all need that in our lives. It’s what keeps us alive and trucking on.

One of the key things that all my years here have taught me is that it doesn’t matter how old you are…it only matters how young you feel.

Something to remember when your significant other starts talking to you about retirement.

It will happen to all of us some day. And you need to plan for it…not just financially, but emotionally as well.

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