Take a seat.
There’s a habit, in almost everything written about starting something new or starting over — and retirement is a kind of new start or starting over, whether anyone asked for it or not — where a starting point is treated as something practical. What can you do. What should you do. How much time is left for it . All reasonable questions. Looked at closely, they all come second.
A real starting point is quieter than those, and it doesn’t show up on a task list because it can’t be scheduled. Whether you want to. Not in the thin sense of preferring tea over coffee, but want to in the sense that gets you up before the alarm, or has you thinking about something on a walk when you meant to be thinking about nothing at all.
Most people reach retirement having spent decades answering “What should I do” consistently — for an employer, a family, a mortgage — that the muscle for “What do I want to do” has gone quiet from disuse. It isn’t gone. It’s simply no longer the first question anyone asks of them, including, often, themselves.
This matters more than it seems like it should, because everything that follows — a task, a goal, something important enough to call a purpose — is really just the shape a want takes once it’s acted on.
Take the want away, and you’re left organising an empty room very tidily.
If any of what follows here is going to be worth your time, it probably has to start before the ledgers and the schedules: not what you’re doing this week, but what, if you’re honest, you actually want.
Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.
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