Never Retire from Life

Regardless of when you retire, your first priority in retirement

must be to activate yourself. Retirement can be anything from the
greatest celebration of life to a dreary bore, depending on the person.
Those who allow themselves to wallow in retirement tend to
lose focus, finding the hours impossible to fill. Those who are
invigorated
by retirement embrace the possibilities newly available to
them, finding themselves doing as much as they did while working,
or even more. Retirement is freedom, but freedom is useful
only if you do something with it.
Jane Pauley was in front of the cameras on the show and
Dateline for more than twenty-five years. Then she retired from
television.
Dateline, I did
not know what I was going to do. I knew I was going to do something,
and I knew it was time to do something different. I did not
want to retire from life,” Jane says.
Today
Despite the appearance that she was escaping television’s pressures,
she never intended to go very far. “When I left
She sought work that reflected her passions and interests:
“What I’ve learned is if I’m going to work, to be its best, it had better
be work I choose.”
Jane spent months working on a memoir of her life in television
spent planning the show before it went on the air as being like a
spent her career in, and for the first time, she is working in front of
a studio audience. Jane says the new format is both a great challenge
and a source of inspiration: “I don’t think I understood how
important working with an audience would be to me. I love it. I
take chances because I know the people in the audience want to
see something different and real. I chose to do this show because,
even with the pressures, it fits who I am, what I do best, and what I
want to do at this point in my life. I’ve discovered I’m more of a
performer than I realized I was.”
Recent retirees were 15 percent more likely to be happy
than those of a similar age who continued working fulltime,
but within six months retirees’ happiness fell behind
that of those of a similar age who were working if the
retirees did not have an active lifestyle.
that had been lying around unfinished in her study. And she began
planning a new talk show. She describes the more than a year she
“fifteen-month pregnancy.”
Jane’s talk show is a step away from the news programming she
about our lives and the world around us. But our daily habits, routines,
and responsibilities often soak up our available time and
attention. Give yourself the opportunity to think, to question, and
good idea but the joy of thought itself.
At seventy-eight, Harry took his thirty-two-foot sailboat out for
to circle the globe again. “I like being alone at sea,” he says. “I like
the challenge of ocean crossing. I’m always delighted to be back
among people, but after a while, I wish I was back at sea again.
If you’re sailing the seas, you have to be constantly engaged in the
process.”
But in calm waters Harry can afford to take some time to read
board, listen to whatever news reports he can pick up on the radio.