Retirement party, part II

Last night Mr R-T invited several old friends (and I use that advisedly  -- I have known them all from 29 - 36 years) to dinner to celebrate my retirement.  Everyone in the group is still working except me, with one of them just starting a new career.  But I do think that perhaps what to do in retirement is on their minds.  The one who loves to bake gave me a book about baking bread; the one who loves to do puzzles gave me a book of  NY Times crossword puzzles, and the one who likes to do stitchery gave me a stitchery kit!

Of course, these are all things that I enjoy doing and that I hope to do more of in retirement, and I found them to be very thoughtful gifts.  But I'm coming to the conclusion that people who aren't retired yet (and I confess that to some extent I felt this way too), think that there is more time in a 'retired day' than I am finding there to be.  I'm not quite sure why.  Maybe it's just that retirement is still new (and I've been a bit under the weather), so I have a pent up collection of things I have been putting off that I need to catch up on.  Maybe I've slowed down, though I don't think that is true.  I certain am less focused on only doing the most important things -- I make sure I take time out most days to do something purely for pleasure, which hasn't been part of my routine for many years and probably isn't part of my friends' routine, and while those moments don't take up a large part of my day, it's not inconsequential.  Whatever it is, I'm barely staying abreast of the 'must do now' actions on my to-do list, rather than all the ones on my 'someday/maybe' list.  Of course, I have added things like this blog to my routine that weren't there before, and somewhere that nasty limit of the 24 hour day hits us all.

Still, I very much enjoyed reminiscing about the days when we thought we had our entire lives in front of us.  There were many ways that we were innocents; I don't think that any of us had the career we would have described at that point, though I doubt that any of us think that his/her planned career would have been better than the one s/he did have.  We all knew each other B.C. (Before Children), and not only have we seen the trials and tribulations (and joys) of babies, toddlers and teens, we know the joys (and perhaps a few trials) of adult children. Now in retrospect, I wish I had asked everyone to predict where we each would be in another 25 years.  I'm sure that we would be completely wrong, but it would be amusing to look back and see how we are still naive innocents.