Retirement?

My mom lists her "occupation" on Facebook as "Happily Retired"! I believe she is representing her occupation accurately. She worked harder than one should have to for many years and since she decided to retire she has never looked back. I am not sure I can say the same. 

Some people, like my husband, start looking toward and planning for their retirement from the start of their career. I think individuals whose professions offer a guaranteed percentage of their wages after X number of years are conditioned to keep their eye on that defined prize, counting the days until they are FREE! 

For me that was not the case. My career path has been winding and varied, with much of it spent as an entrepreneur. As a creative marketing and design professional I always made enough to get by – whether drumming up my own business or freelancing/contracting for others, but didn't often save and certainly didn't have a 401k match or pension plan adding up. I finally realized I'd better have more of a plan in place somewhere in my late 30's, early 40's.

After marrying my husband and having "our" retirement become more of a topic, we loosely decided I'd retire about one year after he did, which would have been about September of 2020. Instead of that being the way things went down, I found myself unemployed as of July 2019, with severance to carry me through November 2019, just before everyone else's employment changed or halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Here I am, almost a year later, in this weird, limbo, unemployed state that I can't seem to call "Happily Retired". I've been forced to look at how much of my feeling of self worth came from my job; from earning money and getting praise for a job well done. I like to have objectives laid out before me and a plan to reach them. I like to finish things so I can check that box. Or so I thought! 

I don't feel like I checked the retirement box. I feel like I was pushed out the door, definitely NOT on my own terms. Nothing like how my husband left his job after 30+ years with fanfare and celebration.

I'm looking for what's next for me and I want it to be something I cannot WAIT to work on every day. And I want it to make a positive impact on a soul level for as many people as possible — to offer insight, peace, light, and inspiration to a world that is weary of conflict, polarization, separation and uncertainty. Could you use any of that?

Then I thought...What if I Yoga? 

And there you have it.

Picking Up Where I Left Off

B

I'm back to my charge. The ABC's of blogging. I started something I really want to finish. I did "A" some time back and now I am going to write every day for the next 25 days, until I finish the alphabet. They say the hardest thing about writing is just doing it. We'll see. 

Today, B is for battle. The battle that we are programmed from birth to fight. The infamous battle between good and evil.  

So what is good and what is evil? Happiness, pleasure, affection, success, love. Those are all good, right? Sorrow, pain, rejection, failure, hatred could be construed as evil. Well, if we get our definitions from the dictionary – that uses defined words to illustrate the definitions of others, we have to have some contextual reference to the words used to define other words to be able to actually give them any real meaning for ourselves. Which is to say that meanings must be construed. 

This makes me "happy". This feels "good". How many times have we used those phrases only to find ourselves at the opposite end of the spectrum before we can blink an eye? I'm so "sad", I feel miserable! This sucks! The ancient rishis call it maya, or delusion and unfortunately, it's the root cause for the battle that goes on through the ages, affecting all humanity until at last they break free. But to break free is no easy task. It seems so much easier to ignore what it would take to do so, and settle for the little "wins" of instant gratification, only to be disappointed in their temporal nature.

So what does it mean to be eternally happy? How can something that we can't touch or taste bring the ultimate satisfaction? Why is affection so gratifying, and loss so devastating? When and how do we really succeed? Where can we find true and lasting love?

We won't know until we finally win the battle between the ego and the soul, the senses and spirit, the noise and the silence. Apparently, the only way to do so is to go within. Retreat from the battlefield where the senses reign and discover the beauty beyond definition that paints the infinite bliss of the inner world. Free from delusion.

And there you have it.