Retirement Is a Beginning

So I’m over 200 days in and it turns out retirement is not a destination but a transition. Which, according to William Bridges (“Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes”), means it contains not only an ending but a beginning. In fact, the former is necessary for the latter.

“It is, after all, the ending that makes the beginning possible,” writes Bridges.

I suppose these words help. In other life transitions (singlehood to married with kids, student life to a career, graduate study to teaching at Amarillo College) the new beginning has been well worth the pain of the ending.

However, the scary thing about this transition is that the new phase (the beginning) is not so clear. Oh, I have dreams. But there are enough blank spaces in them to make me anxious.

Or excited!

***In tomorrow’s blog I’ll talk about the hardest part of transitions—not the beginning nor the end but the in-between.