If you're paying attention over the weeks and months of these writings of mine, you'll notice there's a theme that I've talked about retirement more than I've ever talked about it before.
I wouldn't like there to be a misconception here, though, that I am preparing to stop or give up or sell or get out of the way.
While I cannot discount any of that ever happening, it's not my intention, so don't be misled by the fact that this is a subject which interests me a lot at the moment.
I could write about this for days and days, and I think I could probably speak about it in a one-day master class, but I'm not sure anyone would be interested. I'm watching with real interest how other people are navigating the same phase of life that I am in and what their strategies are for this.
With that in mind, I'm drawn towards information, experience and writing about retirement or about people's philosophies, and there was an article in The Telegraph at the weekend, interviewing 3 different people about retirement and the pros and cons of that.
One of the things that seems to be a theme for people who retire, who have done something other than working in a banal job and just seeing their time out until they can have an extended holiday, is the creation of a vacuum, and then the urge to fill the vacuum.
This focuses on what the article describes as ‘retiring from or retiring to’.
I understand if you hate your job, that you would really like to stop, and still get paid and be able to do what you wanted, and that all ties in with the myth of ‘work-life balance’.
That would be someone who is 'retiring from the job’, someone trying to get away from it and to do something else.
It is possible, though, to retire to something; an example of retiring to something is to become a full-time grandparent, or to stop working in your paid employment and to go and run a charity or a football club, or whatever it is. It's also possible to retire to health, to create a better lifestyle for yourself, more exercise, better eating, etc.
The other alternative is to try within your work environment to create some control of the situation that you have, so you don't have to run away.
For one reason or another, this is what my brother has achieved later on in his life, where he was someone who would always be retiring from his work to someone who now thinks, 'Why would I retire?' He has very cleverly created a little ecosystem within his work environment, which allows him pretty much to have the life that he wants. That's super clever.
And so, for a lot of us, they're retiring to something might well be retiring to a different version of her work life, and certainly, that seems to be what's happening to me. No, actually, it's exactly what's happening to me, and by design.
I spoke to my team a few weeks ago before I went to Africa and told them that I had just been fired (honestly) by myself, away from the job that I was doing before.
We have extraordinary opportunities that exist at the Campbell Clinic, and some of them might work and some of them might not, or all of them might not, but in order for us to have a correct go at this, I have to, ‘kill the person I was born to be to become the person I want to be’, yet again. For the 100th time in my career.
And so I'm retiring from being the brave warrior, I always was.
I'm retiring from the person who always, always runs into the burning building first, who wants to be the hero, and I'm stepping back.
Not in the amount that I do, but in the things that I do. I'm getting out of the way for other people to be a lot more brilliant than I am or have ever been.
Blog Post Number - 4443
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