Growing Old: Growing Young

The Baby Boom generation is now entering its retirement years.

Having been born in 1946, I'm among the first of the baby boomers to retire, which I've done. I actually retired at age 63; I'm now 66. One of my reasons for retiring was not one of the normal ones: to help raise my grandson, who is now four years old. Yes, I'm raising another generation. But, I well know that most baby boomers will not be retiring and raising a young child at the same time. Many will be retiring to a life of leisure, travel, and to looking for ways to remain relevant to the world.

This is one of the directions my blog will now take: how do we retirees remain relevant to the world?

This is certainly not a new problem, if indeed it is a problem, beginning with my generation. It's probably been an issue for many retirees in the industrialized civilization. Living on the farms, I imagine, kept one busy and relevant right to the day of death. I'm sure a farmer's work is never done. But when accountants, doctors, lawyers, bus drivers, police persons, teachers, garbage workers, real estate agents, sales people, truck drivers, etc., retire, they are often possibly confronted with another lifetime to live. It begs the question, what do I do now?

I certainly cannot tell someone else how to live his or her life in retirement or during any other time period. I can only relate my own experiences and what I learn from others and from research. And there's a lot of research from which to learn. Learning is nice and suffices for its own sake, but doing (being, in the philosophical sense) is the essence of life. What we believe and what we do from day-to-day is important. How we live is perhaps the most important component of living. That's what I hope to explore on my blog in the future. It's a vast territory with many theories and possible answers, and that's part of the beauty of retirement, I can begin a new journey, and perhaps fulfill some of my unfulfilled dreams. I suppose there are others like me.

So, I hope you join me on my new journey: to remain relevant to the world.

Blogging: Absent, but not gone.

I haven't posted much or written many posts lately. I have some in rough drafts that are not finished. But, the fact is, I'm still around.

What have I been doing? Drawing and painting mainly. My Two-D Design course takes up a great deal of my time. This is the only course I take, and I'm retired (sort of), so I can bring my course assignments as close to perfection as I like. But that takes up a lot of time. Art is about details, and they take time to perfect. (Really, how do full-time art students perfect their art projects when juggling four or five courses at the same time? I feel for them.) But I enjoy it so much that I can spend hours working on a piece of art and not even realize I've been working for hours. I've always been a perfectionist (which isn't necessarily a good thing), so I'm right at home with this artwork.

I haven't been writing. This is a dilemma for me. Where does my future as a writer lay? Do I even have one anymore? I have several books that are highly polished and I could self-publish them pretty much as they are, but I don't feel connected to them right now. My writing imagination is somewhat dormant these days, although I've been feeling some rumblings in the background. The desire to write isn't dead in me yet. But I'm not sure when I'll put pen to paper again.