Mark the Transition

Managing the Early Days - Part 1

The early days of retirement can feel exhilarating and disorienting. You’ve got all this freedom, but it can be hard to know what to do with it. Like many of life’s biggest changes, you can’t fully prepare for retirement until you’re going through it. But I wish I’d been a bit more deliberate about having something to retire to. Heading into it with no plan at all was a mistake.

So, over the next five posts I have five ideas to help you find your footing in the early days.

First up, you should mark the transition.

In the words of psychologist Jeltje Gordon-Lennox, rituals act as life’s punctuation marks. They give meaning. They can take lots of shapes:

• Ordering from McDonald’s drive thru on the day I got my driver’s license, and being forced to drive around while eating a cheeseburger to ensure I could pass the eat-and-drive test

• Greg, Travis, Phil and I burning our school notes after the final day of high school

• Taking a babymoon in Kaikoura to mark the last time that we would be a family of three before baby Stan arrived

• Buying a piece of art when I got divorced

So, one thing I didn’t do, but wish I had, was to perform a ritual to celebrate and mark the transition into retirement. Something tangible, like buying art, throwing a party, or even growing a beard, would have helped me feel like I’d crossed a finish line.

One of the things I did when I was the Chief Customer Officer at Trade Me was to try and bring our customers into the office, by way of giant posters. As a parting gift, my workmates replaced one of our customers in the Trade Me foyer with a giant photo of me. Pretty cool way to mark the transition.