Tuesday, August 13, 2019

When I'm Sixty-four


Will I still matter when I am Sixty-Four?

By Dan McDonald

 

          Michelle Van Loon wrote an article that inspired this response. Her work entitled, “Your Peak Life Now: How to Face Career Decline with Grace and Faith” focused on how careers often peak around age fifty. A peaked or declining career can be frustrating. This blog focuses on the nearing retirement part of life which is mentioned also in Van Loon's article. I recommend Van Loon's article, which emphasizes an Ecclesiastes perspective, which can be read here.

            I am now 63 years old. I can remember when my father, around the age of 63 declared he was going to retire. I was around 23 then, and could not quite understand why he would retire when in only a couple of more years his benefits would be much better than at the younger age. His reply was fairly simple, saying “I am tired.” Now that I am at 63 I understand the feeling. We can call this time of life the “I am tired” years.

            My Dad's retirement years are now a model for retirement I hope to make use of in approaching my retirement years. He carried within his life the sort of work ethic which characterized many whose working careers began during the Great Depression. They faced a world where finding work was a challenge. The importance of finding and doing work came to be written in big letters in their evolving DNA as workers. Retirement, for my Dad, could never mean the end of work. It could only mean changing what sort of work he did that seemed appropriate to the challenges which came with his entering life's sunset years.

            Retirement meant he left the production welding his factory work. It meant cutting back from his years of working the farms of numerous farm owners. It meant cutting back to a less than full sized farm, where he raised a few head of beef cattle and a fairly large garden, and did some welding jobs for neighbors who had broken farm implements.

            I saw my Dad make important changes during his retirement years. His new place in life offered him opportunities as well cutting back on the amount of time he had once devoted to his work. My Dad, in earlier years had a work bench that was disorganized. A small corner was devoted to being a work space which could be enlarged by shoving around piles of disorganized tools and materials. Once he was retired he began to organize everything. Maybe he simply hadn't had the time to keep things organized. As a retiree, his work bench got cleared off and there began to places for tools, materials, and his work area became thoroughly organized. Maybe he was able to do this because instead of being owned by his work in life, he could begin to work with time to do his work in a more planned method.

            His growth in being organized soon began to make an impact on my parents' home. My Mom was the sort of housewife who loved to spend hours in the kitchen. We certainly ate well in our home. When it came to keeping a house clean and organized, my Mom was much more tested in those aspects of life. My Dad, practicing his growing skills of organizing and straightening soon began to bring those practices to the house. Their relationship had experienced ups and downs, but as my Dad began sharing more of the household duties, their life began to be more of a partnership, and in my estimation their treatment of one another blossomed to greater depths as they cared for one another in those sunset years when life has special reflections within an environment of increasing levels of pain and suffering. They saw one another in the vulnerabilities of older age, and became somewhat more appreciative of each other's challenges.

            As I am now 63, I am finding my Dad’s approach to his retirement years a helpful pattern for me to imitate. I look forward to a different work pace, new emphases, and goals more fitting my “I am tired” years. This is true to the life realism recognized by the writer of Ecclesiastes, which Michelle Van Loon's article so well addressed.

            Rather than telling you all the things I want to do in my sunset years, I will encourage you to wonder when the time comes when you reach the tired years, what sort of approach will you employ to bring joy and purpose to your experiencing of the sunset years?

            I enjoyed listening to the Beatles when I was young. Now I am wondering what life will be for me in a few months when I turn sixty-four. How will I live when I am sixty-four and more years old? We adjust to varied phases in life. We learn to acquire skills and plans to match the varied phases of our lives. Whether one is twenty-four, forty-four, or sixty-four we face the opportunities for new experiences and the challenges we face in our varied life phases. The Book of Ecclesiastes offers wisdom beneath the challenges of life's phases. There is something grand and also difficult at every turn in life's flow. Life offers something wonderful at 64, though maybe it will come with more aches and pains and weariness than we knew at 44 and definitely more than most of us knew at 24.