Lessons learned from the first year or so of rewirement…

Some of the most common things I experienced that have been confirmed time and time again by others I have talked to are the ups and downs emotionally when you retire from a long career, how it’s easy to overdo leisure activities where they are no longer as much fun as they once were and how so many work relationships disappear when you leave the workplace.

The ups and downs emotionally are no surprise when you retire; you have lost something that was probably very important to you and certainly occupied a lot of your time. Like many losses, the magnitude of the emotional swing diminishes fairly quickly (over a period of a couple of months in my case). The loss is tempered most significantly when it is replaced by something new that you value like plugging into a non-profit, mentoring someone, spending more time with your family.

I believe you can get too much of a good thing… or at least too much of something you looked forward to when you were employed. Some of my friends focused on their golf game only to realize that playing a couple times a week was no longer something they looked forward to like they used to. In my case it was fishing. Fishing a couple times a week did grow a bit stale but I have found that a once a week (not on a weekend when everyone else is out there) trip is still tons of fun.

Probably the biggest surprise on the post-retirement side of life was the changes in the relationships with long time colleagues at work. People I worked side by side with for years and years just slipped out of my life. We stayed friends but without a common task or mission, there wasn’t the catalyst to maintain the relationship. That being said, if you are deliberate and work at keeping in touch with some of those work friends, it is very rewarding. Equally rewarding are the new friendships that I am enjoying with the consulting work and non-profit work that has grown in my “rewirement”.