The choices and decisions available to most people as they move from working full-time into retirement are wide and varied.
Retirement gives us so many opportunities to try new things, unconstrained by the factors that influenced our earlier lives and limited our options like feeding a growing family.
This is a bit like being a child again, when we choose which exam subjects took our fancy, not realising how much, or how little impact those choices would make on how we made our living for the next forty years or so.
At this time in our lives for the first time probably we have choices without the pressure to succeed that coloured our thinking before we started work. We now have the opportunity to take our lives in a completely new direction, which is an exciting but can be a daunting prospect for many of us.
For many people today, retirement isn’t about saying goodbye to our workmates, taking home the carriage clock and spending the rest of our days watching daytime TV! This is a chance to fill our time with a myriad of things that we may never have tried, or even contemplated before.
We all know that meeting new people and trying out new things helps keep our minds, bodies and spirits in good shape. So why not join a club, organisation or friendship group or take up a sport, hobby or pastime that we’ve never had the time to explore? Or learn a new skill at evening, or daytime classes. Have you ever wanted to read that lengthy novel, or even write one, learn how to cook, converse in a foreign language, or get to grips with the world of technology?
We’d really like to hear from you if you’ve started something different and exciting now you have more time on your hands.
