Words Connie Dunwoody
“Don’t you feel guilty? Even a little?” asked my husband, Peter, as I gleefully entered my third month of retirement. “Nope,” I rejoined, instantly. “Did you?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I felt guilty getting paid to do nothing.” I looked at him, askance. “But that’s your money. You earned it. You paid into the pension plan and RRSPs and made sure you could do … this … every day.” I waved vaguely around the front yard where we were enjoying coffee. Retired coffee. Coffee around which no meeting would spring up. An environment without emails. No deadlines. No reason to wear anything with a waistband that feels like it has a grudge with your innards.
There is a particular kind of silence that arrives the morning after you retire. It hums with possibility and with a faint, disorienting question: “Now what?”
Peter answered that question by cleaning the floors. All of them. Three times. By Wednesday, you could have performed minor surgery in our kitchen without violating any health codes. The man who once had back-to-back meetings was now locked in mortal combat with a mop.
For some, this change can be deeply unsettling. After years of structure, the sudden openness can feel like being dropped into a field with no fences. You wander. You circle. You feel a little lost. When my cousin retired, she told me she kept a daily list of Things Accomplished and shared it with her husband when he got home from work. “See what I did today?” she noted. “You don’t have to do that,” he gently said. “You get to ‘Just Be’.”
I, on the other hand, greeted retirement enthusiastically. No alarm clock? Delightful. No commute? Revolutionary. A whole day that unfolds according to my whims? I practically skipped to the kettle.
Because here’s the thing I didn’t understand before: retirement isn’t the absence of something. It’s the presence of everything I didn’t have time for before.
It’s the book I kept meaning to read but didn’t because laundry, life and exhaustion intervened. It’s the walk I take simply because the air feels like an invitation. It’s calling a friend in the middle of the day just because I can, and discovering they, too, are standing in their kitchen wondering if they should clean the floors again.
Some people approach retirement like a problem to be solved. They build schedules. They join committees. They take up hobbies with the intensity of someone training for the Olympics. And there’s nothing wrong with that – structure can be comforting; it gives shape to the day.
But maybe there’s another way to do this: Let the day find you. You can wake up and ask: “What feels like living, today?” Not necessarily productive. Not wildly efficient. Living.
Maybe it’s cycling, or gardening. Maybe it’s volunteering. Maybe it’s sitting with a cup of coffee long enough to watch the light move across the room – a surprisingly satisfying form of entertainment. And yes, occasionally, it might even include cleaning the floors.
So maybe retirement isn’t a void, but a new chapter waiting to be read. And like any good chapter, it has its own rhythm, its own surprises and its own quiet plot twists.
Perhaps the trick is to stop trying to recreate the life you just left. Instead, let yourself be a beginner again: curious, unscheduled and a little bit gloriously untethered.
Because after all those years of showing up where you had to be, this is the season where you get to show up where you want to be, even if, occasionally, that looks suspiciously like: “The floors could use another pass.”
Resist the urge. Or don’t. It’s your chapter now.
