Perspective

I no longer have a job, but there’s a big difference between being unemployed and being retired. I didn’t lose my job; I reached the end of my work career.

According to the International Labor Organization, last year the COVID 19 pandemic and resulting lockdown caused 114 million people to lose their jobs. That’s equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. Though many have regained employment, people are still struggling. When my job ended, I was celebrated at work and family members gave me a party.

Three large wildfires are burning in Northern California. Together they have scorched tens of thousands of acres and forced thousands of people from their homes. Families are losing everything but their lives, and it happens fast and unexpectedly.

I, too, am facing loss –of living in my sweet little duplex, of having to let go of personal belongings. But I get to calibrate such pruning with time. There is no rush; I’m not on the clock as I begin to sort through a closet filled with too many items, to decide which miscellaneous kitchen paraphernalia to keep, to appraise what’s stored in boxes in my garage that I haven’t opened since moving here eight years ago. I have the luxury of time to regulate my losses.

Facing into my retirement I am both excited and somewhat apprehensive, wondering how to make my finances work for the rest of my life while feeling the exhilaration of newly found freedom. Candidly, I can only see today; I remember yesterday and hope for the future. Today is undisturbed, pleasant, happily abundant. It’s a little like a rope tug-of-war children might play on slippery summer grass. There’s laughter amid the struggle because the day is warm, and the outcome is irrelevant in terms of who gets dinner that night. I remain at peace because my experience of exhilaration versus my feelings of apprehension will not determine future opportunity.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ~Henry David Thoreau