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Excerpts from
Breaking the
Watch
"Oren and I went off camping for three weeks after I retired. I
took a pile of novels, worked through my insecurities, the nostalgia, the
blues, doubts, mourning for people. I saw that happiness was a route, not
a destination. My last day at work I slipped off my watch and I haven't
put it on since. . . . I've been able to do what I want to when I want
to."
"You can have a positive outlook on retirement, but don't fool yourself
into thinking that at 65 you can actually live out the dreams that were
vivid when you were 30 years younger. Retirement now is not as thrilling
as it might have been two or three decades ago. When you've lived that
much more of your life, it's difficult, or at least different, because
there are a lot of memories, a lot of history. . . . Believe me, just
having hobbies wouldn't be sufficient to build a life around. If that's
all you can do, you might as well have stayed at work."
"Retirement's different from a vacation, which is a break from work so
that you can go back to work. No. This is a break with work. And for me
the goal has been one of balance: finding the way to feed my spirit, my
intellect, my ties to the people I care about."
"What particularly excited me about retirement was when I began to see it
as a new chapter with empty pages, ones that I was free to fill in any way
I wanted to. . . . I'm so glad I didn't plan anything specific for it,
because my plans would only have been based on my past experiences,
whereas everything that's happened to me since retiring has been new."
"For me, this is what retirement has meant: An unexpected invitation.
Something like the childhood dream of walking through a hidden door and
stepping into . . . what? . . . some strange, magic land."
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